It’s been awhile since I made my last post on the site. Throughout the summer I was busy working for a team in Miami as a remote web developer. Yes, while Miami was blessed with swelling hot temperatures I was stuck inside faced with some good old Scottish drizzle!

However, this was a great opportunity to get my feet wet in a real work environment. While the environment itself was virtual the work was time critical. It was here I got to learn about the Agile process in a web project, and I also got to work with the Django framework for my second time commercially!

I was thankful for the skills and experience the work gave me, but it’s now time to concentrate on securing my chances of work in the future. I am studying a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Computer Systems Development. For me, this is a great opportunity to equip myself with new skills, such as the exploration of Service-Orientated Architecture, Interface Design, Ethics in IT, Oracle databases and more.

From what I have learned so far, SOA seems like a really interesting and crucial topic/technology to know (after all it is a core module), as it seems to be a pretty modern way to bring old legacy systems up-to-date by making certain things those companies depend on to be reusable and easily integrated into existing systems. It seems that SOA benefits companies who are also seeking to merge with other companies too to help with the integration process.

I will continue to try and seek smaller web projects as a freelancer for the next year, but expect the blog to go a different route for the time being to do with my education and my thoughts on certain goings on in the IT industry.

My portfolio site has had a much needed redesign. It took a couple of days but I’m happy with how it has turned out. Also, I spent extra time to learn HTML5 , and decided to integrate this cool new standard to the site. HTML5 isn’t exactly finalized, but I thought that now would be a great time to start using the upcoming standard.

Semantically it makes alot more sense for web accessibility, both for humans and machines, and this can only mean more intelligent search and also better readability for screen-readers. Very soon I will produce some blog posts about how I’m using HTML5, and how you can actually start using HTML5 on your websites right now.

I have a project I’m working on at the moment, another website for the MyWebWOW! team via oDesk using the Joomla! CMS. I have been working on oDesk for awhile now, and have been building up positive feedback for potential clients, which can found on my oDesk profile.