hello world

I wonder how many coder blogs start off with “hello world” as the first post title? Google: first post blog “hello world” … plenty… well, here’s another one!

Ahem. [now for the part of my first blog post that explains why I'm starting a blog]

I’ve been coding for a while now (since about 1995 as a hobby and since 2000 as a profession) and in this time have come accross some pretty amazing technologies. Of these technologies one in particular has (risking over dramatisation) changed my life — that is XML.

I remember it was the office rage in about 1997 when all the Gartner reports were predicting that, within ten years, XML would be used in eighty percent of software. Sorry Gartner, you got it wrong…I’d say XML was used to develop close to 100% of new software products, especially if you include IDEs in that box…So I wandered off all enthusiastic about programming and XML and got my formal qualifications (that piece of paper rolled up in the back of some cupboard at home) and in 2000 started freelancing as a web developer.

People that know me understand that I’ve got bit of an artistic bent which explains why I was playing with Adobe Illustrator in around 2001 when I noticed this odd little plug-in thing caled the Adobe SVG Viewer…I remember specifically this cool little rotate animation of a bi-plane. It wasn’t until a year or two later that I decided to update my web site (digitalcraft.com.au) to feature data driven SVG and articles bagging Flash (how times change!). This started what was, for me,  the best few years of coding fun ever…until now…

About a year ago I started building an iGoogle gadget for the blog where I post my art readings. At the time I exclaimed out loud “This is pretty cool! I think i’ll really keep my eye on what Google are doing in the web2.0 space!!”, (joke!) this was even though I’d been using Google docs for several years at the time ;)  But gadgets did spark my interest in Google’s efforts when I can accross two google projects just about the same day svgweb and GWT…so since then I’ve been pottering away on some pretty fun stuff and am now ready to share my self indulgent hacks with the rest of the world.

So, as they now say, watch this blog.