CodeFrenzy

Last time I posted about “Me”, I mentioned that Chris and I were moving across to London. I was due to start my new job at Next Jump in a few weeks time, and Chris was looking for work by sending out dozens of emails every day. Well, that was over a month ago now and during that time, we started realizing that things really weren’t looking good for Chris to find someone to sponsor him for a work permit in the UK (you can read all about his feelings re this here). We waited about as long as we could before making an inevitable decision – forget the UK for now – let’s go to Brisbane (Australia) instead. Because Chris and I are both NZ citizens, we are entitled to live and work in Australia. This means we should, in theory, have no big problem finding work there. The stress and tension created by not knowing whether Chris was even going to be able to stay in the UK for more than 6 months (tourist visa) was awful and so we had to make a call. It wasn’t an easy decision to make because I was really looking forward to my new job at Next Jump and we’d already shipped 4 boxes of personal effects across to London as well, not to mention the $2000 price tag attached to my UK HSMP visa (which is now all sorted out and stamped in my passport, doh!). But it felt like the right decision to make.

Since then, a few things have happened. Chris flew back to NZ (yay!), we spent a week in Wellington applying for roles in Brisbane on SEEK, we both did a few phone interviews for potential jobs, and right now we’re in Brisbane for about a week, doing a few face-to-face interviews with companies that are interested in us. We’re staying with Rheanna and Sanjay, friends from Wellington, which has been so great. (Thanks guys!!)

I’ll tell you what – I have done so many interviews over the past couple of years it’s really quite ridiculous. Including the 10 or so interviews I did with Google, I guess I’ve done about.. 20 or so interviews… mostly technical. I’m kinda tired of doing them, but hopefully I won’t have to for much longer. The stupid thing is that most of those 20 or so interviews have actually ended in job offers, but for one reason or another I haven’t accepted them. Dumb eh? Anyway, right now I’m focusing on the mining industry because it seems like a really really interesting industry to be involved in and there is lots of work for software developers in mining here in Australia. Sweet. I had 1 interview + 1 meeting with a recruiter on Thursday and 2 interviews + 3 meetings with recruiters on Friday. Wowee. Another couple of interviews scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. Busy busy busy!!

The plan is to secure a job for at least one of us while we’re here, fly back to Wellington mid-next week then come back about a week after that, after shipping all our stuff over and saying goodbye to everyone all over again. Hopefully then we’ll find us a nice place to live and settle down a bit! We haven’t had our own place for more than 6 months now and it’s getting a bit tiring living out of backpacks, suitcases and other people’s kindness.

So yeah, it’s been a bit of a stressful and confusing time but I think we’ve made the right decision. The last few days in Brisbane have been really cool – it’s a really nice city, the weather is wonderful (I LOVE the sunshine!), there are beaches near by and it looks like we’ll be able to afford to live in a neat apartment with a pool and gym in the complex. I’m not complaining :P. Oh, and it’s also a bit closer to NZ too, so hopefully friends and family will be able to come and visit us more often than they would’ve if we had ended up in the UK!

Anyway, I’ll post again when I have some more definite news on where I’ll be working and stuff like that :)

As some of you may by now know, Chris and I have written a website called ‘TravelStash’. It’s essentially a blogging site intended for travelers. It integrates things normally associated with blogging (i.e. writing blog posts, uploading photos, comments) with a map. The structure behind TravelStash is a bit complex but it does make sense. Basically when you join up, you get your own membership. Once you’re a member, you can create a group for yourself and invite others to join your group. Each member can belong to many groups. Someone in the group creates a trip and then all the members of that group are able to log in and post an article about that trip.

We used TravelStash for our ‘Camp Europe’ holiday and more recently for our ‘Exploring the East’ holiday (even though we haven’t quite finished blogging about that one yet… lazy!). Although we’ve almost finished writing all the code necessary to allow others to join, create their own groups, blog about their trips and upload photos from their holidays, we haven’t quite opened it up to the general public. We’re hoping to do that real soon though so keep posted on that one :)

In the mean time however, I thought I might add a couple of new features to TravelStash. First is the ability to view an entire group’s photos. Until now, photos were only shown on the article with which they were associated. I figured it might be nice to view all of a group’s photos on one page rather than having to individually click on all the articles to see all their photos. You can see an example of that here. Neat eh?

The other feature I added only last night were ‘Travel Tips’. I had lunch with a good friend the other day who told me that it would be neat if we had travel tips posted on TravelStash. He’s right, Chris and I had thought of doing that anyway so I figured I might as well get onto it and just do it. So a few code changes later and we’ve got ‘Travel Tips’ on TravelStash! As you can see, not many travel tips just yet but I’ll make sure to add some more and hopefully when we open TravelStash up to the general public and people flock to it, they’ll add their amazing travel tips too. I was thinking it might be cool to allow comments on travel tips too in case others have something to say about it. Ahh, so many ideas.

Anyway, that’s about it for new features on TravelStash. Chris and I have heaps of ideas for new features, however, so with a bit of luck there may be some cool new stuff on there soon. And obviously we’re really excited about ‘launching’ it to the general public. I’m sure we’ll both learn lots from that experience. :)