write.as/jonbeckett

For the last few years our children have taken part in a summer camp in town, that has steadily grown, year on year. I think last year they had in the region of 400 children, and 100 helpers on-site at any one time. Each year my other half has been inexorably drawn into the organisational side of the camp – last year she became the “owner” of “registrations” – the process of gathering applications from children, parents, and helpers to take part in the the camp. Over the course of the couple of months of coralling, organising, and dealing with questions from the several hundred people, I began to hear horror stories about the online tools they were using to run the camp.

Here's the thing – the website they have been using torun the camp was written by some guy, for another camp – so it doesn't really work for anybody else, but nobody else involved had the skills to do anything about it – so they lived with this clunky, broken, badly thought out system.

Here's another thing – I'm a professional software and web developer. Guess who (after witnessing the mayhem caused by the broken system they have been using for the last several years) volunteered himself to build something better...

And that's how I have ended up going to bed at 2am for the last two nights running.

I was going to regale you with exactly what I've been up to – installing virtual servers, configuring databases, designing table structures, and writing mountains of source code – but you might actually fall asleep while standing up and injure yourself quite badly.

So yeah – after sitting in front of a desk writing code all day at work for the last few days, I have been going home, and doing the same into the early hours (interspersed with mountains of washing up, and running around the house tidying up like a bad tempered lunatic).

I can't complain too much – I volunteered after all – and I do have a small band of friends out there on the interwebs that ask after me now and again. You know who you are – and you are awesome.

If you're wondering about the image above this blog post, it's the Ubuntu logo. I'm using Linux to develop the new website, and installing and running it on the old desktop PC at home has reminded me just how much better than Windows it is. It's no accident that most of the devs at Google run a version of Ubuntu...