I work on the web, and have been for many years. Ever since I dialed to the internet with my 14.4k modem in high school, I fell in love with the web.

Back in the days, I coded HTML in notepad using nested tables layout, kept refreshing my netscape browser to check my changes. When Flash was the new cool thing, I started hacking flash’s actionscript when it didn’t have script editor.

And then I got into server side programming. Coldfusion at work, PHP at home. Developing a CMS was a prerequisite for every web design companies. I also did abit of research into the semantic web as my final year project at University.

After getting sick of programming in Flash (it’s so buggy) and building yet another CMS, I got into front end development. CSS, web standards, tableless XHTML, accessibility were all the new buzz words. Consulting in HTML development could be a profession, thanks to IE and the browser war.

Then came the era of web2.0. Ajax was the new must have feature in all web apps. So I started building hard core ajax apps, tested painfully in all browsers and joined an online storage startup (let’s not talk about that). I almost stopped programming entirely and just wanted to stay away from browser compatibility issues. Usability consulting seemed to be a more satisfying job.

One day, I heard about this new MVC framework called Ruby on Rails. I wasn’t too interested at first, as I’ve seen too many not-so-user-friendly MVC attempts. I spent sometime building a little app, I was enlightened. Since then I’ve been fullly indulged with ruby and building web apps again.

Then, Steve Jobs announced a new device – iPhone. That has changed the mobile applications and mobile internet game completely. Occasionally, I dream about what I could do with the iPhone.

Now as an entrepreneur, I’ve started a ruby on rails software development company and we’ve developed our own product Ankoder. Since youtube was proven to be successful, future of videos will be huge. Bandwidth speed will be much faster, cost will be lower, people would like to take their media to many other devices. We’re hoping we can lower the barrier of entry for small companies to ride this next wave.

I’m back from my long honeymoon and wedding reception world tour. Actually I was back two weeks ago, I’ve just got back on track with my emails and blogging. Taking 6 weeks away from the internet world is a good break. Happy times are always too short. We had a very fun wedding day. The days leading up to the wedding were _stressful_, I’m sure anyone that has gone through the same deal would understand. Thank you to all the friends and family, everyone has been very helpful with our wedding. Everything went pretty smoothly despite the roller coaster weather.

We had two receptions after Sydney, one in HK and one in Manila. We had alot of Chinese banquets! First stop was Hong Kong, then Japan for 2 weeks and Philippines for 1.5 weeks. We took about 30gb worth of videos…. I’m still processing those 🙂 There’s been some interesting (embarassing) experiences.. I would tell you in person.

Can’t believe it is finally happening. Organising a wedding is definitely not easy (when you try to work and have a life at the same time). It reminds me of the Uni days when I’m rushing to finish projects before the deadlines. Its going alright so far, hopefully it’ll be a happy day for everyone.

We took some pre-wedding photos, just thought I’ll share with you. Since we announced our engagement on the web as well. These are taken by our lovely photographers at Fotoexpresssion.

Finally I squeezed some time to finish reading “getting things done” by David Allen. When I first heard of this book 1-2 years ago, I thought to myself I already knew how to manage my time, so I wasn’t very keen to spend time learning about this. Since then, my nature of work has changed from full time programming to managing my new startup venture. I need some new inspiration to how to manage my time properly. This book did give some advice, but in my opinion it is not the very complete.

My view on time management is all about priorities, do the things that needs to be done and skip doing the things that can be deferred. It is this constant deferring of things that puts stress on the person while trying to keep these tasks in the brain. This book’s main point is to find a system that you trust and rely on and off load all the to do items from your brain to this system. It has similar idea to extreme programming concepts with TDD and story cards which also tries to take the stress out of the developer. There’s mentions of 43 folders – having 12 months + 31 days folders – which holds memos for future references. I personally don’t think it is that helpful for me unless I have a secretary managing it.

To practise this concept, the book’s website has some recommendation for some GTD software, but I haven’t found anything that suits me and that I feel has fully grasped the concept in the book. One thing I hate about most todo list software is that after checking the task as complete, it’ll almost always keep that item in the list rather than removing it. Why isnt there a simple to-do list that keeps track of the todo item while not cluttering the interface.

Another thing that I felt was missing from the book was how to deal with interruptions. He basically said knowledge workers should be able to deal with interruptions and prioritising their time themselves. I feel that if there wasn’t interruptions that stuff up our planning, we probably wont be seeking solutions for time management. I’ll like to see someone explaining the dynamics of interruptions and how to deal with them efficiently.