WES Progress Update February 2012

Its been a while since my last update on World Elite Soccer but we’ve (well the developer in fairness – not me!) made some great progress over the last few weeks and I wanted to quickly summarise where we are. There is really two big pieces of news to share with you all:

(1) Game Engine Testing

We’d done some preliminary testing on the new game engine previously, but if you remember from the previous update there was a lot of really weird score lines that looked more like a rugby match than a football game. We weren’t worried about this at the time because we had a lot of additional pre and post game processes which we hadn’t yet updated and ran as part of the process.

Since then we’ve been working on converting the additional pre and post game processes and these were completed just this week. We’ve ran some really basic initial tests playing around with game settings, line-ups and aggression levels to get a feel for whether the results are coming out “about right” and things look really promising on that front.

Whoop!

(2) Match Recap Pages

For those of you who read my previous update we also had a major issue in that key files were missing that generated the match recap pages – without them you just got error pages when you tried to view the post match details. Matt and Pat tried and tried to get a hold of the original source code, which built these pages but frustratingly for us all they haven’t been able to.

The impact on the WES timeline in terms of getting the game playable again without those files would have been very significant…..we were even slightly nervous about whether we could backwards engineer the pages at all.

Bizarrely though as we were testing the game engine we stumbled across some old pages which just happen to have the original source code embedded in them, so we’ve been able to pull the code from the pages, update it to the new language and gradually get them working, which obviously makes it a lot easier to analyse whether the game engine is working properly or not.

There is still some teething issues with a few areas, but nothing we expect to cause major headaches. As far as 2012 goes, this was the best news I’ve had all year!!

Its Been A While Since My Last Post

Its been a while since I last posted any updates, so I thought I’d just do a general update on what I’ve been up to over the last couple of months – its been pretty busy, with lots of exciting change.

After nearly 6 years working for Premier Farnell I decided that it was time to move on and I took up a role at AsiaRooms as Head of SEO. It certainly wasn’t an easy choice having spent almost 6 years (my entire career to date) at Premier Farnell. They generally treated me fantastically and gave me lots of opportunities to grow and develop my career and I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending them as an employer to others.

I am proud of what I achieved at Premier Farnell particularly becoming Global Head of SEO at 26 years old, managing SEO for more than 40 international websites and 10 languages. Its fair to say I had a lot of help from some great mentors in my time there and I’ll no doubt continue to bug them on and off for a long while yet.

Playing With My Sony Nex-7 – Marina Bay Singapore

Well after hunting for 2 months I finally managed to secure a Sony Nex-7 ahead of the masses. Still suffering from some jet lag after getting back from the UK I decided to go for a play at around 5am on a quiet Saturday morning.

I was using the Nex-7 with the Carl Zeiss 24mm f1/8 lens and headed down to Marina Bay in Singapore to get some night shots. These were all taken on the move without the usage of a tripod so whilst these images are pretty sharp at a small size their is some noise on the original sized files.

Each of the images will link out to Flickr should you want to view the original files or look at more of the images.

Things I’ve Done in 2011 and Focus Areas for 2012

Highlights from 2011

On the professional side of things I took a new role as Global SEO lead at Premier Farnell and recruited 3 remarkably talented SEO heads into the team. As a team we got a lot of great things moving in a very short space of time, with lots of functional and content enhancements as well as some excellent (totally white hat) link acquisition activities.

It was a tough year though as I often averaged over 15 hours a day trying to keep on top of things. Bit of advice here – don’t do a global role based in Singapore if your organisations revenue and headcount are primarily in the US and Europe.

10 Things I Miss About The UK

Whilst I love living in Singapore having moved there in September 2010 there is a number of things I do tend to miss from time to time about the UK. Luckily I’ve had plenty of time to visit for work (4 times in 2011) and there is a few things I always crave on the journey home.

Below is the top 10 things I miss about living in the UK, not including the obvious friends and family.

If you’re living abroad what do you miss about the UK? or if you’re living in the UK what do you love most about living there?

I Wonder How Many Websites I’ve Started?

As I begin a new personal website I find myself reflecting on how many other websites and blogs I’ve started and ended over the years and whether this will be any different?

In fairness many of the sites I started and closed down were more about self development and learning new techniques that I could employ in the workplace. I don’t think its a reflection of my personality or unwillingness to see things through.

I started a small scale SEO consultancy business for example when I was working full time for a large organisation. The site was probably live for around 12 months and it got me 2 paying clients before I closed it down (1 of those is still active today).