Welcome to mikebell.io
I code and listen to music, powered by coffee and whisky.
Back when I was a young kid I remember being influenced by so much music. My Dad with heavy rock from the 70/80s, my mum with Elton John and random Christian based music. Stand out album from this period has to be:
The Waterboys - Fishermans Blues - Stand out track has to be "We Will Not Be Lovers", to this day I love this track. I was recently reminded of this while watching Dom Hemingway, Doms daughter covers "Fishermans Blues" quite well.
As a grew up I found the sounds of electronic music. I remember buying so many Euphoria CDs and listening to them non stop. Electronic music specifically trance and house represented a feeling that was totally new in my musical history.
Over the weekend I’ve been working on migrating my site away from Drupal. I managed to get everything up and running on Octopress but it just doesn’t feel right.
It’s not as flexible as Drupal and it seems the simplest of things breaks it. In theory I like the concept of Octopress but it just seems clunky compared to Drupal.
I’ll be slowly making upgrades to this site:
- Adding Disqus
- Tidying the theme up
- Adding extra theme elements
- Adding some colour!!!
As of the 6th February I’ve stepped down from NWDUG it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now and I now have other things that need my focus. Phil Norton is a great person to work with and I hope that whoever steps up to help will have as much fun as I have over the past few years.
So whats next? Well I intend to ramp up my involvement with Code Club Manchester, it’s something that I believe in strongly and think I can make a great start with it. I’ll still be running Drupal Sprints Manchester (follow at http://twitter.com/drupalsprints) but the format will be different and new rules will be put into place.
- Calm the fuck down.
- No I’m not quitting my job.
- I’m happy with Drupal and will continue to work with it.
- Those that know me should realise I’ve not worked in depth with Drupal in a long time.
- My current project is great and it’s made me realise that I need to spend more time with underlying tech than just Drupal, the best way I can describe it is this project is London and Drupal is the Thames, it runs all the way through but it’s by no means the sum of all it’s parts.
Hopefully that will put things in perspective now.
I'm proud to announce that I'll be involved with Code Club Manchester! CTI has graciously sponsored this great initiative. Both me and Paul Johnson have volunteered our time to help steer the Code Club in Manchester and make sure it's as successful as possible.
This is something that I feel really passionate about, it's important that the kids get a real feel for what programming actually is (and not just MS Word and Excel!). This practical experience will help to shape how kids feel and treat IT in the future.
We're planning two events in February that we feel will be really interesting and important for anyone to attend:
I really enjoy the sprints however there are few issues, some from me and some brought up by others who attend the sprints. I'm hoping to address them. With this in mind here is a revised manifesto for upcoming sprints:
Recently I had to work on a server that was heavily restricted by a third party company. They were using an archaic version of drush so I decided to change it!
I have no access to sudo or any form of root account, this made things even more interesting. No wget either.
Once upon a time there was a project lead working on a big project. As it got closer and closer to christmas projects were due and deployed to the magical kingdom of testing, the winds of change requests and testing blew strong.
On the eve of christmas as everyone sat around watching servers glowing, heating their hands on the charred sticks of ram and the still clicking hard drives. Unable to do anything but look on, the project lead hung his head wishing that Santa would bring him a full test suite tomorrow.
Merry Christmas and may all your tests pass.
I'm sat hear listening to the new Burial Ep - Rival Dealer and thinking about the year that's past.
This year has been quite a ride for me.
I met Hannah who has become a huge part of my life.
I turned down a job I would later regret and rectify.
Watched as loved ones passed away. Held Hannah close.
Decided to quit my job and move on to harder challenges.
This means I'm in a much better place.
2014 will prove to be pretty damned awesome.