I am really excited about the fact that Lightning Tools now has a Head Office, it's going to have a huge impact on the way we work and it will be great to work closer with the team. 

Last August my girlfriend and I moved to our current flat in Bristol, it has a second bedroom which I have converted into my office, it’s a decent size and allows me to shut the world out and get my head down to work. The place we were in before was pretty small and working from home in your front room is tough on all concerned, all lines between work and life are gone and you don’t feel that you ever stop. It is always too easy to just fire up the laptop and keep working if there is nothing on TV.

I still do find myself working a lot of hours, especially because my girlfriend usually works 1 or 2 days at the weekend as I often work some of them too. I have been working on a fantastic project since last October and like a challenging computer game, sometimes it is hard to put it down or if you are stuck on a particularly tough problem, you find yourself popping back in to have a second stab at it before you go to bed!

One of the ‘things’ about working from home for me is that when I get ‘that’ feeling that I want to be productive, I usually pick up the next task on my work list or go back to the problem I have been working on all day. It is not the pressure of work which is forcing me to do this, I personally want the products I am working on to excel, I want the company I am working for to do well, I actually want to put in the extra effort. In doing this though I very rarely look at myself as a product which needs a regular update too. I am lucky to be working with some great technologies and do have an interest in getting to know them to the best of my ability so I don’t feel like its one way traffic, I am giving them my time and code output and I am gaining knowledge. It is always difficult when you try to learn to develop for something if you are just playing in the sandbox, to have a real problem that you need to create a well structured, maintainable, supportable, documented and clean solution for it makes you put more effort in and allows you to get more out. What I want out of any position is knowledge, satisfaction and obviously a fair reflection in pay.

Nick and Brett have been very keen for me to publicise the coding issues we come across and manage to resolve either on the Lightning Tools blog or my own blog when relevant. I have been naff at doing this so far, it has been a year and I have re-designed my blog about 4 times and to date have 1 post, the others got killed in a horrific hosting transfer accident, tragic. From the start it was always made clear that this position was going to be an opportunity to learn from some great people and have the opportunity to meet and talk to some of the best in the industry, I have had the chance to do this twice so far this year, once at the San Diego Best Practices Conference and the second at the London Best Practices – Anyone who is working with SharePoint should get themselves along if the opportunity arises. I feel that I can begin to give back to the community now, I didn’t up until recently think that I had anything worthy to say but feel I have gained enough to warrant putting some more blog entries out there. Like you, I read other peoples blogs and some people are so articulate and they can describe an issue and its resolution with fantastic clarity, it takes a deep understanding and a pleasant reading style to pull this off, I was going to say I hope I can pull that off too, but in fact I am just going to put out the best blog entries I can and take it from there.

So starting in the next couple of weeks I am going to be making the commute between Bristol and Reading on a frequent basis which means that I am going to be spending a decent number of hours on the train. Very much like Nick I am a compulsive buyer of books and it is going to give me a fantastic portion of ‘me’ time to read them. I have a fairly large back catalog, I seem to buy about 5 for every 1 I read, there are quite a few for reference not on this list, but there are those that deserve a complete read, re-read and some note-taking.

The books I have on my ‘to-read’ pile are

• The Speed Reading Book by Tony Buzan
• Use Your Memory by Tony Buzan
• Use Your Head by Tony Buzan
• The CSS Anthology by Rachel Andrew
• Agile Principles, Patters and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin
• C# in Depth – Jon Skeet
• How We Test Software At Microsoft® by Alan Page, Ken Johnston and Bj Rollison
• Inside Office SharePoint Server by Patrick Tisseghem
• Crystal Clear by Alistair Cockburn
• Framework Design Guidelines (2nd Edition) by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams
• Don’t Make Me Think (2nd Edition) by Steve Krug

I am also going to spend the time putting together some blog entries and getting them up here, I am planning to make 1 of my 3 days on the train a blog day, the others are for reading.