Dan Hilton

As the title says, I’m back being a digital agency technology peep, for MediaClash a consumer publishing and digital agency that also produces a series of city based titles such as Bath Life, Clifton life, etc. I’m really enjoying it - lots to do, including some improvement of development processes, building a new internal knowledge base and getting an internal Mario Kart competition up an running.
In other news I came second in a Channel 4 competition to build a web mash-up based on their RSS feeds for Film 4, which was cool - pushed my knowledge of jQuery further than ever before (good!). Starting to get back in playing with Python - code looks so much cleaner then with PHP. PHP 6 is starting to look a bit Java-like with it’s namespaces and such. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing but I do wonder about trying to be something it’s not. Surely by now everyone understands that large internet applications can be built in PHP, Python, ASP.NET, erlang, etc and that it’s more down to the abstract engineering rather than the particular language. Some languages are easier than others to be fair (Cobol on Coals?) but the theories and algorithms are the same.

I also got engaged to Laura recently. We’re going to get married next August. Very exciting but feel I’m part of something more complex than the d-day landings!