I wasn’t quite sure how head-on I was going to hit this topic when I started my blog, but… why not, I feel. Most people who know me will know that I quit school five weeks ago (and am awaiting the dreaded exam results so I can hopefully be shipped off to university). To pass the time (I don’t do spare time well), I took up a summer job, as a web developer.I’m going to attempt to not talk too explicitly about work; this is a public blog, after all - not that I’m sure anyone reads it - but I have some general thoughts that are worth blogging.

First and foremost, I’ve never really been one to shirk work… I can procrastinate a little, but if there’s something I’m vaguely interested in, I’ll leap in with both feet. Most people I was at school with seem to be able to make the summer disappear perfectly well - with going on holiday, seeing people, and just passing time - which would probably allow me to be consumed by jealousy for my 6am mornings and rolling back in at 6-30pm that working full-time entails.

It’s so completely different to school it will probably only make sense to someone who left very recently. With all the will in the world, eventually you give up putting the 100% effort in at school; after 7 years of compulsary education, with everything winding down, there’s just really no point. With work, you just don’t get the option - there’s no “down-time”, no saying you’ve had enough, and, if you’re stupid like me, no breaks between 9 hours staring at a screen either.

The reason this is such a big deal at the moment is because the complete contrast is shocking - and will be again, I feel, after university (which I get the impression gives you even more free time than school to fill) - but that’s not what makes work difficult.

School was pretty hellish for a lot of the time I was there. Personally, the end-game has always been trying to get out of there in the best state possible, and my internal motivator is now pushing me harder than I’ve ever done before… simply because I’ve got to prove that without the backup of being in a closeted environment, I can survive. After all, if something goes wrong, I’m only there a few months, right?

At school, my dyspraxia was something which most teachers and all of my friends, by the end of school, were aware of. Allowances were made for me - most people could recognise when I was out of my depth and would forcibly stop me. People would make me take breaks so I didn’t sit for hours staring at the same screen - besides, the environment was never conducive to it.

In contrast, I’ve told no-one at work. It’s a much more adult atmosphere, male-dominated as most of the technology industry is, and I think the reactions from a lot of people would be… “well, what’s your problem?” I sometimes say it’s more unfortunate to have dyspraxia than dyslexia (which my Dad has, rather badly), simply because everyone and their dog understands dyslexia now. Sure, it’s still more complicated than everyone makes out (I’d love to see how my Dad’s inability to remember anyone’s name he hasn’t met about 50 times equates to “not being able to spell”), but the basic premise is acknowledged by most people.

Most people don’t understand dyspraxia. The best way I have of describing it in passing (this is owed a long blog entry at some point in the future) is that it causes co-ordination difficulties, but you still can’t encapsulate the loss of short-term memory, the difficulty in picking concepts up unless they’re explained to you over and over again, and the need to just sometimes “escape” from an environment.

Today, in a loud well-lit office, the flourescent light over my head was flashing. This makes my head go absolutely crazy. The best way I’ve got, in a sentence, to describe day-to-day life at the moment, is “trying to do my absolute best, in an environment full of people more intelligent and more confident than me, while struggling with co-ordination difficulties and trying not to reject the environment entirely.”

I’ve grown out of the feeling that this is something that will improve as I grow up - it’ll just stay as it is now, and I will find ways to deal with it. The hardest thing about adapting to work, though, is that you can’t just explain this to colleagues and managers (perhaps I’d be surprised about my thoughts on the male-dominated industry being uncaring, but then again, perhaps not), and so…

I never knew trying to do the best work you could, and trying to make yourself better, would be the difficult route. I’m hoping in the long run, this will be worth more to me, and be more rewarding in terms of what I learn and the experience I gain, than just doing nothing all summer would have been.

I’m not sure I believe it yet.

I’ve spent the day working like crazy over an Open University report, and tonight I made my first tentative steps towards starting to look at learning C. I’ll blog about real life when there’s some actual news, but for now, even though it feels like my head is spinning from code, this (via Daring Fireball) rings very true:

Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal.

- Gustavo Duarte

The term “startup” became very popular during the whole dot-com bubble/crash, but there seems to have been a rather remarkable shift since then in what a startup actually is. Technology companies aren’t exactly a new idea, but this concept of the “startup”, as it is now, seems very different.

When someone mentions a technology “startup”, I’m drawn to thinking of two guys slaving away over lines of code, ending up with something pretty and usable that just catches on. I think this seems to be the basis for many of the recent - and not so recent - success stories: Twitter, last.fm, Facebook - going back to LiveJournal and even Google. There’s a difference from the old companies - Apple and Microsoft, for example - because all the ‘new’ companies seem to be moving with the changing times, and are providing web services; a realisation that simply wasn’t available ten years ago (okay, Google were and will be ahead of the times, but it was a long time before they started moving away from just search).

The difference seems to be that the so-called ‘new’ companies don’t appear to be started by people who have a particular fundamental element of business sense, but rather those who see something that can be done - and then just do it. Paul Graham, who runs a VC firm for startups, says:

There’s nothing wrong with being unsure. If you’re a hacker thinking about starting a startup and hesitating before taking the leap, you’re part of a grand tradition. Larry and Sergey seem to have felt the same before they started Google, and so did Jerry and Filo before they started Yahoo. In fact, I’d guess the most successful startups are the ones started by uncertain hackers rather than gung-ho business guys.

All the startup companies these days, with the focus on “web 2.0″, are interested in user-centric services, and they’re all social networking focused. I went to an IT conference last year and asked one of the speakers (from iCrossing) if he felt “web 2.0″ would ever… fade out. After clarifying that I meant social networking in general, he commented that while he felt the current websites would fade out (and I agree, longlevity of a website takes a lot to be established) the entire idea of social networking was user-centric, to do with people interacting and talking to each other - which they would always continue doing.

The technology industry, especially anything to do with the web, seems to be focused on getting people to interact. That, for me, is the only real difference between the “web” and “web 2.0″ (although I’m starting to dislike the usage of the terms, there needs to be a divide) - is that the original web provided content, the “new” web allows people to interact.

And all that takes for a new company (and, to be realistic, the potential to create something that catches on very quickly) is a little idea. The technical expertise isn’t a barrier anymore - many people I know would have the ability to make something at the level of Facebook, or Twitter, (or lest I say more reliable than MySpace, as it’s written in ColdFusion…) All it takes is an idea, and to be in the right place at the right time.

If that’s all that’s standing between me and you and being the next big thing, then something’s changed. You don’t need to know how big companies work anymore to run a business. You need to know what users - what people just like you - want, and then you need to do it.

Jack’s Mannequin’s new album, The Glass Passenger, will be released in September 2009.

'The Glass Passenger' album art

Track Listing
Crashin’
Spinning
Swim
American Love
What Gets You Off
Suicide Blond
Annie Use Your Telescope
Bloodshot
Hammers and Strings (A lullaby)
Drop Out – The So Unknown
Orphans
The Resolution
Caves

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything up on this website, let alone a blog. A few nights ago, this started off as a bit of a break from the development side - it’s strange, when I dislike the design side of web development so much, how nice it is to take a break from PHP once in a while!

I’m going to make some effort to keep this blog updated and add things to the website - hopefully I’ll have things that are actually worth blogging about, what with working through the summer, and (fingers crossed!) starting university in October. If only a few people read this, that’d be nice - but mostly I think it’ll serve as a fun archive if I can keep it up.