mark mcaulay

First up, the big one. In April 2011, I joined EQ Design in Aberdeen to lead the digital offering of the company. In short, I have never been so happy working for someone else. I get to work with a brilliant team who also happen to be lovely people. I feel at home here and I love my job. Result!

Looking at my aims for backend, frontend, and creative for 2011, I seem to have done all that I wanted to do and a little bit more. Where I fell down was in fitness. I got no hillwalking done at all and I barely went running. I did walk more but I really need to try harder next year.

I should also make some mention of the little missions I went on in 2011 starting with a desire to get out of my confort zone and meet other web/digital people around Scotland. I posted about one journey to Edinburgh where i went lone wolf although I didn’t post about the Highland Fling conf (also in Edinburgh) which was just as eye opening and one of the best little conferences i’ve been to. If the Highland Fling runs again this year, i’ll be there. So on top of subject matter related to what I do for a living, I also decided to put myself through a couple of lifestyle challenges. My month of being vegetarian is detailed here. In October, a bunch of us decided to give up alcohol for a month, as it was the most boring month ever, I didn’t blog about it. We did run a blog for people to contribute to and if you want to observe some of our misery, it’s over here.

Much like last year, I will largely stuck to Python/Django in my own time. At work, it’s all about PHP and ExpressionEngine but hopefully this will be the year that I can start phasing out much of the legacy PHP work, replacing it with Django or EE where necessary. I wont be looking to learn another language this coming year as I’m more than happy with Django and EE to take care of anything that comes our way at this stage.

It was all about responsive design last year and HTML5/CSS3 are the tools to deliver that. This year I need to get my head fully around SASS and I will be continuing with my JavaScript education. I really want to have a much better understanding of, and fluency in JavaScript as it’s one of the things that will continue to be a core requirement in 2012 and further ahead.

I’ve taken a much larger interest in graphic design again and as well as buying typography and design theory books, i’ve also been able to pester the designers at EQ. I now get excited about paper samples and appreciate nice packaging again. I’ll be continuing to learn about all of this. One of the new-found pleasures of working with designers who really live and breathe design, is that i can ask questions and know i’ll get an informed, thought provoking and interesting reply. I’ve bought some tasty pens, pencils and some notebooks, yep…i’ll be drawing again. I have a couple of tattoo designs to put together for friends and i want to get my daughter excited about drawing as well. Maybe i’ll post some of my pics on here.

I did a little running last year although i may as well not have bothered, this is the year i’m going to do it though, starting today in fact with day 1/week 1 of couch to 10k.

Somewhere along the line, I started smoking again. This is stupid. I have quit again and will use the money I save to buy that mac i’ve not been able to afford for some reason :/

So here’s to another year. I hope you all have a succesfull one :)