Right now I live on Walney Island in Cumbria. This is where I grew up and where my family are. It’s a really beautiful place with long beaches, a close community, and good friends. But it’s hardly a ‘hot-spot’ for web development. If you’re not into ship building, this really isn’t a great place to build your career. So, I’m looking to move.

So, I’m looking for a position where I can work on some exciting, cool, and unusual projects with some clever people in a good location, with a competitive salary. Is that too much to ask for? (Probably).

I love CodeIgniter, and I’d like to find a company that feels the same way. But, I’m open to trying and learning new things too. As long as I’m challenged and I have plenty of coffee, I’ll be happy.

In terms of location, I think Europe would be best for me since there’s no issues with visas or work permits.

So, if you have a vacancy that sounds a bit like this, please let me know and I can send you a copy of my CV.
You can contact me by email: elliot at haughin.com

After a gruelling train journey from Barrow-in-Furness to Bristol (about 6 hours), I finally arrived in Bristol and asked a friendly police office directions to the pub. (Which was right outside the station, and apparently ‘unmissable’). I was greeted at the pub by Phil, Adam, and a few of the attendees. The original plan for that night was to have a ‘couple’ there then hit the hotel to be refreshed for the first ‘official’ conference day. That didn’t happen. Somehow we ended up at a cider bar on a boat drinking what can only be described as alcoholic fruit squash whilst bitching about MSSQL and fondly remembering our table-based days.

Day 1 – Talks

This was the official start of the conference. I woke up (a little late), got ready, then relied on my iPhone battery lasting long enough to direct me to the venue. On the way I almost started jogging (I was running late!). Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the venue to find some people messing around with a projector while most of the attendees watched and offered kind words of encouragement. Those who weren’t overseeing the work were hiding in the corner drinking coffee (if you could call it coffee).

I decided to join my under-caffeinated brethren. After 15 minutes or so Mr. Sturgeon arrived, to his own conference. Now, I’m in a band, so I know all about turning up late to appear cool, but I don’t really think this worked at a web development conference.

After much faffing we were finally ready to begin. I took my seat, (still to hungover to stand), and listened intently to the first set of talks.

Kevin Prince kicked things off. I wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind for intently listening to a talk. However, when I saw a bumper pack of chocolates and sweeties my hangover disappeared for a short while. Kevin gave a great talk on using CodeIgniter in a production environment, featuring some of the tools and techniques you can use to make sure things go as smoothly as possible. Kevin was well-prepared, interesting, and most importantly – had sweets.

Following Kevins talk, I got a little nervous. I knew I was up straight after lunch, and I didn’t have free chocolates. Shit.

Next up was Joel Gascoigne. Joel talked about building a startup with CodeIgniter and some of the methods you can use to successfully startup. There was some great content in the talk with startup theories from lots of very clever people. And, there were more flow-charts than in a Microsoft board room. You could tell that Joel had put lots of time into preparing his talk, and delivered it brilliantly. It kind of made me want to leave freelancing and get into startups.

After two talks it was time for a quick break (I think it was at this point anyway). So, some of us went out for a smoke and to refill the coffee (many people had learned their lessons and stuck to tea by now). At this point many people were noticing some things that were very very annoying. A lack of internet being the first. A web development conference really should have good wifi available. This meant most people were relying on smartphones and patchy 3G. It’s a shame really, I think more people would have tweeted and talked about the conference if there was some wifi available.

There was another point I should have raised, which was that of lighting, sound, and vision. The technical aspects of the conference weren’t much to write home about. There were no mics, and I think people were too polite to mention if they couldn’t hear the speaker. The stage lighting was turned off, so it became quite difficult to see the speakers. I know that we’re supposed to be looking at the slides, but psychologists say we understand spoken word better when we can see who’s speaking. Hand actions and body language play a key part in communication. A microphone and a simple lamp on the desk on stage would have been enough to improve things.

Well, with the break over, it was time for Dean Howe. Dean had ‘kind of’ prepared a talk before the conference but then got cold feet and decided to just throw that out the window. Instead of his planned topic, he decided to do a Q&A session. Although I didn’t take part (I was finishing up my slides), I could hear plenty of people getting involved in the session. From what I could see, many of the speakers were chipping in with parts of answers to give detailed responses.

With the ‘shambles’ session over it was time for lunch. After a 2 mile round-trip for lunch I arrived back to the venue ready to rock out my talk.

The ‘bottom’ line of my talk was:

1. Facebook is here and everyone uses it, love it or hate it.
2. People are interested in what their friends are doing, however stupid.
3. People don’t like signing up for stuff.
4. Integrate Facebook into your CodeIgniter application.

I decided to attempt to overcome some of the technical issues I’d noticed with other speakers. Firstly, I decided to walk around the stage like I was mustering the troops at a communist revolution rally. Then I decided to pretty much shout my entire talk at people, again, much like a communist revolution rally. I didn’t have sweets to throw at people, but I had clipart, which generally distracted people from my failings.

As part of my talk, I decided to release ‘Socialize‘, a social authentication module for CodeIgniter. So, although I didn’t have sweets. I had open-source code

With my talk done and dusted it was time for Adam Griffiths to take to the stage and talk about CodeIgniter 2.0(.0). I was quite pleased with his chosen topic because he was pretty much directly answering the questions I’d been asked about CI 2.0 by some of the attendees. Adam talked about the key differences, the ‘roadmap’, the things one must do to migrate, and answered the question I hate: ‘Where can I get CI 2.0?’ (several times). Oh, and yes, as Adam said. CI 2.0 is STABLE!

Finally Phil took to the stage wielding a can on Strongbow. (which I almost commandeered at the beginning of my talk). Phil went through PyroCMS, and talked about building open source software with CodeIgniter. Well, I think that’s what he talked about. If I’m completely honest, by this time I was pretty much zoned out. At least someone had bought some good coffee at lunch time to keep me going. I did catch some of Phil’s talk, but there were two lads with iPads who kept distracting me. It was like having a naked woman sat in the seat next to you asking to be stroked. Sorry Phil, but the iPad got the attention.

Day 2 – ‘Hack Day’

At the end of the first day I realized there would be some problems with the proposed ‘hack day’. To start with there was no wifi, which meant no easy way to collaborate, share code, grab examples of regex from crappy old sites… This just wasn’t going to work. As well as this, there were no desks set up, we weren’t actually in teams, etc. Since my laptop was broken I decided to finish the conference early and head home shortly after mid-day.

Review

Overall I had a great time at CiCon2010, but we all know there were things that need work for next time. But that’s my main point. It doesn’t really matter that this conference wasn’t has super-professional as other conferences. This was a first-time. But, there’s been plenty of lessons learned, and I’m sure the next one will be even better!

After walking my dog through the lanes to Vickerstown allotments on Walney, I decided to email my local council to ask them how I was progressing on the waiting list. After-all, I had been waiting for over a year. The next day I received the following response from the council:

Hello Mr Haughin,

I afraid there will still be quite a wait, you are currently 106th for
the allotments on Walney and 358th on the overall list. You will be
waiting for approximately 3-4 years for an allotment on Walney.

Of all the recent developments made by my local council, I really do struggle to think of any that have been beneficial to the environment. We’ve had a new retail zone, a new link road, a new one-way system, new paving in the town centre, and new flats for the elderly. All of which seem like good developments. But, with the government encouraging us to cut down our carbon footprints, doesn’t it make sense to help people produce their own food?

It’s estimated that 20% of the UK’s carbon footprint comes from food production. This might seem rather high, but it’s not really surprising when you look at where our food comes from. “Jimmy’s Supermarket Secrets” first brought to my attention that much of our soft fruit (berries, cherries, etc…) are only in season during the summer months. The rest of the time it’s grown in warmer climates (such as Africa), then refrigerated and sent (usually via air) to Britain.

Potatoes are now grown in the desert in Egypt, then shipped to the UK. One of the huge costs of this is peat. Sand is a very poor growing medium for potatoes, so companies in Egypt ship in tons of peat from Ireland, then pipe water out of the Nile to grow a spud destined for the UK. Peat is a very delicate natural resource; it takes hundreds of years for peat bogs to form.

I could go on about the provenance of our food, but that’s not the main point of this post. The fact is, when people grow their own food, they naturally begin to eat more foods that are in season. My problem is getting land, since allotments are just a dream for me right now.

There may be other options though. I’ve been looking into projects like landshare, which aim to connect people who need land with people who have land. This is a great idea, but in smaller towns like mine, there just aren’t enough people signing up. So instead, maybe the solution for people like me, is to take matters into their own hands.

For example, I know the landlord of my local pub pretty well. They’ve got a very large garden, most of which is just grass. Mike (the landlord) has shown a real interest in some of my rare home-grown chillies since he also serves food in the pub (mainly stir-fry’s). He might be interested in giving up a small area of his garden in return for a share of the harvest. I may actually put this to Mike, and some other people I know, and gauge their response. Whilst it is unorthodox, it might just be my only way to get hold of some land.

Allotments are now looked on as a very old-fashioned thing, but they’re far from it; I believe they are critical to helping people become more self-sufficient. Without national and local government intervention, allotments will always be side-lined, which is a real shame. I’m actually going to try and write a column for my local newspaper, and write to my local councillors and MP to try and push this issue more.

Firstly, my code. Since I first started releasing CodeIgniter Libraries they’ve been widely used and loved. But, there’s a problem. I’ve not had the time to support them or update them.
The solution to this, I believe, is to start again, with updated, clean code.

I released the beta version of the Facebook library a couple of weeks ago, and so-far, things are looking good. It uses the Graph API, and supports the Open Graph (for social plugins). The final version of this should be released by the end of the week. Thanks again to everyone who’s tested it for me.

The Twitter CodeIgniter library needs some serious love. I’m trying to rebuild it in a way which doesn’t limit the ‘future’ api calls that may be introduced by twitter.

To make releases more straight-forward, I’ll be building an RSS feed for code releases, which will make sure you can always keep up-to-date with my Libraries. This will be part of a bigger change that I’m building into my site which includes my new ‘Code‘ page and ‘Going Green‘, a section of my blog where I’m documenting my attempts to live a more sustainable life.

So, keep subscribed to my Twitter and RSS Feed and you’ll be the first to know when things get moving.

And in other news, I’m now the proud owner of Winston, my new dog (He’s a Miniature Schnauzer)

Yup, he’s cute. Damned cute.

They’re really taking off, and I think they’ll have a great harvest.

There’s also a raspberry bush that’s just showing 3 tiny leaves, and a blueberry bush that’s starting to shoot up. I’ll post an update when I get them all in place in my new house on Wednesday.

I’ll also post some pics of my indoor growing/propagation setup with the CFL.

Although I’m not moving back into my house for another couple of weeks, I have already made a start by growing some veg indoors, well, starting them off at least.
In late March I decided to plant Tomatoes, Peppers, Chillies, Spring Onions, and Rocket. Unfortunately the Spring Onions and Rocket didn’t do too well, so I threw them out and invested in two fruit plants. A blueberry plant, and a raspberry plant. My girlfriend has also started off two pumpkins indoors. They’re doing pretty well, but in my new yard I’ll have to find some pretty clever ways to get all of my plants planted in a space-efficient way.

Now, when I say I have a limited space in which to build a vegetable garden, I really do mean it! Here’s a quick sketch of the back of my house. It’s a traditional small Victorian terrace.

This project is probably one of the smallest vegetable gardens in the country. And I might be keeping a couple of hens too! But, If I can pull it off, I should end up one step closer to living a sustainable life. As a freelance web developer, I should have time to build and tend to my garden, it’s one of the joys of freelancing. So, with space this tight, I’m going to need to be really inventive with the way I use space.

Luckily, I’ve found some fantastic ideas on instructables, like this vertical growing system made using a wardrobe shoe-hanger. The beauty of this is that it’s really cheap and simple to setup. The shoe-hangers are only about £4! I think these vertical growing solutions will be the way forward in my space, I could get a lot more plants across one wall using ideas like this.

This system will work well for smaller plants and herbs like basil and mint, but larger vine-like plants like tomatoes need more room.

I’ll post a video of my yard when I get back in my house, but hopefully this helps you see what sort of a challenge I have here. If I ever decide to move house, I’ll certainly be looking at bigger gardens!

With the very limited space I’ll have available I’m planning to grow vegetables, keep chickens, and to recycle almost everything I can.

I’ll post a full update on the 28th of May, when I finally get back into my house with some pictures, or maybe even a video of the space I’ll be using to start growing my own vegetables.
This section of my site also has its own special RSS Feed, so remember to keep subscribed!

There’s a taboo surrounding rates, salaries, and benefits. Generally, we don’t discuss them, which can lead to a lot of problems if you’re just starting out freelancing, or indeed, if you’re considering it. Whilst I’m not going to openly discuss my rates, I do want to make a point before I continue with the main content of this article. Make sure you have a group of close friends (preferably fellow freelancers) that you don’t mind discussing rates with. This way, you’re not basing your rates off ‘commodity’ priced freelance rates you may find on e-lance or similar sites.

Freelancing seems like the perfect lifestyle, but to begin with, you may well find yourself in a position of ‘Feast and Famine’. Essentially, because you’re working on 2-3 week projects then sending off an invoice, there’s times when your pay won’t be very regular. When I started freelancing, I was working for 6 weeks, then sending off and invoice and waiting 2-3 weeks for it to be paid. During this time, it’s quite easy to find yourself a bit short. It happens to all of us.

There are some simple things you can do to help this though.

Minimize Downtime

When you’re coming to the end of a project, make sure you’ve got your next one lined up to start as soon as possible. Sure, you’ll probably want to take a few days off. However, when your current project is coming to an end, start talking to your next client, get contracts, spec documents, and all the paper works sorted. Then, when you finish your project you’re ready to roll with a new one.

Budget your Invoices

When my first big invoice got paid, the first thing I did was go out and buy a load of gadgets, have a night out on the town, and generally lived like a king. I quickly found that I’d spent half of the money during the first week, and that I might have to survive another 4-5 weeks on the remaining money. The solution was simple, budget. I decided that from then on, I would make a weekly budget and stick to it, regardless of ‘big’ invoices being paid. This way, if I was short of work, there’d still be some money in the account, maybe 3 or 4 weeks worth on this same budget.

And, if you manage to go for 6 months without any ‘dry’ spells in work, you’ll find that the left over money in the account starts to build up. Always try to leave 4 weeks worth in the account, but any extra you have, pop it in a separate savings account (a simple instant access one). Ok, you’re not going to make a great deal of interest on it with the way the economy is right now, but it’s out of the way and off your mind. Once the amount in here builds up you can start considering buying new equipment, paying to go to conferences, whatever. If you spend these savings on something useful for your business, you could also write it off as an expense for tax.

Which brings me nicely onto my next point.

The tax-man doesn’t hate you.

Whenever I give advice about tax, I’ll always preface it with this: ALWAYS consult an accountant before making tax decisions.
Right, obviously I’m talking about the UK tax system, but it’s quite similar to other tax systems. Contrary to popular belief, the tax-man doesn’t hate you, in-fact if you’re registered as self-employed, you really can make a good living without the tax-man taking you for a ride.

The first thing you need to do is know how much tax you’re going to pay. Freelancing without some good accounting software is like playing darts whilst drunk in a cave. There are plenty of great solutions out there, but I personally recommend using FreeAgent, especially if you’re based in the UK. (That’s a referrer link).

FreeAgent keeps a running tally on the tax you will owe for the current tax year. So, when an invoice is paid, the amount of tax jumps up a little bit. Using this trick, I have a separate savings account which I use to keep the tax money. When an invoice is paid, I immediately transfer some money into this tax account so that it matches the current tax year figure exactly.

This way, when I get to the end of the tax year, I have the exact amount of money I need to pay the tax bill without having to go through a period of ‘saving up’ 3 or 4 big invoices to pay last years tax bill.

Get paid regularly.

There’s a techniques used by the construction industry. Self-employed builders will often insist on being paid at the end of each week for the work completed that week. It’s a simple idea, and most people agree to it. But web development is a whole different basket of candles. (I just made that up). Many web development companies will insist that you invoice them on their time-scales. But you need to remember something important. You’re the provider. When was the last time you saw someone walk into a supermarket, pick up a load of goods, then insist they be sent an invoice with 60-day terms. That’s not how it works. If someone really wants your services, then you have the power to choose how and when you get paid.

Obviously you shouldn’t be completely unreasonable, but just remember that if you get paid regularly, you’re less likely to run into trouble.

Don’t be too proud

If the worst case scenario occurs, then you’ve got to be realistic about it. Sometimes you just have to ask for help. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s not a sign that you’ve failed. Hopefully, if you follow some of the advice above, you might not need to. But, if you do find yourself really up against it, there’s no point being proud. I know that I’ve got some really close family and friends who would always be willing to help me financially should something go wrong.

Sometimes this is a much better option than going to a bank or racking up debt on a credit card. If it’s a short term problem and you know you have an invoice coming in next week, then don’t be too proud to ask for help.

Finally…

I hope you’ll find some of this article useful. My reason for writing it is simple, they’re the problems I had when I first started freelancing, and I’m sure there’s a whole load of people who will have the same problems.

Please consult an accountant or appropriate financial advisor before making any financial and tax decisions, and remember this:
All of the stress, the struggle, and the strain to start with is in every way worth what you get out of it. The freedom, flexibility, and satisfaction that comes from freelancing.

I get plenty of emails asking me if this version of CodeIgniter would be released, and it’s clear there’s been a huge buzz about this in the wider development community. So, I’m going to take you through the changes and explain what you need to know, and what this means for CodeIgniter as a framework moving forward.

I’ll make this quite clear: I will not just list all the changes in the changelog. You should be able to find and read them yourselves. This post is more of a summary of the important changes and what they mean for Ellislab, developers, and clients.

CodeIgniter 2.0 is built using PHP5!

CodeIgniter 2.0 WILL NOT work on PHP4 environments. For a long time CodeIgniter was one of just a few frameworks that supported PHP4. Whilst this did attract a great deal of people to it, it became clear that at some point Ellislab would end up forking the CodeIgniter framework to produce a PHP5 only version. For me this is no surprise at all, but there’s a different, and more appropriate way to view this change.

PHP 4 support is deprecated. Features new to 2.0.0 may not be support PHP 4, and all legacy features will no longer support PHP 4 as of 2.1.0.

Most people will assume that this change simply means one thing: that people can’t use CodeIgniter on a PHP4 server. Whilst this is true, it’s a rather insignificant implication of this change. The main, and most important thing about this change is what it does for Ellislab and the framework as a whole. Ellislab can now use the more powerful features available in PHP5 in CodeIgniter’s core.

CodeIgniter will be able to use visibility modifiers to restrict access of object variables to the object itself. Static methods and variables, to allow code to call a class’ methods and variables without instantiating object. Abstract classes and interfaces, Reflection, __contruct and __destruct, autoloading. The list goes on and on.

In short, the most important implication of this change is that Ellislab now really has some big guns they can use to move CodeIgniter forward. The improvements in PHP5 allow them to really unleash some seriously cool, clean code.

Application Packages

Many CodeIgniter applications I’ve worked on have contained more that one ‘application’ directory. For example, my main client right now has two application directories: ‘app’ and ‘cp’. The app directory contains all the code for the front-end application, and the ‘cp’ directory contains all the code for the back-end application.

However, there are some common libraries, helpers, views, and config files that both use. Right now I have to have two copies of each of these files. One for each application directory. But, now you can create a ‘common’ code area that will allow you to place libraries, helpers, config files, language files, and views in a common location, which can be accessed by any number of application directories.

Here’s how it could be used for this purpose:

// Structure:

// application/app = APPPATH (contains controllers, views etc)

// application/_common = my package, contains a few helpers and libraries.

$this->load->add_package_path(BASEPATH.’application/_common/’);

$this->load->helper(‘booya’);

Once you’ve written this code, you’ll be able to access booya_helper.php inside of application/_common/ despite this directory being outside of the current APPPATH. This, I believe, is one of the most exciting ways to use these new application packages.

View files for packages are currently in the works, but that’d just sweeten the deal.

Drivers

There’s a new type of library known as a driver. Essentially, it’s a way of having a parent class with many child classes. Child classes are able to access the parent class, but not its sibilings. For example, here’s how you might use one:

I’m quite excited about this, it means that grouping code with similar functionality would be easier, for example:

I think drivers will be a great new way for developers, such as myself, to release a ‘package’ of libraries that all do similar things (for example some of my API libraries). Drivers will also help us keep code DRY (Don’t repeat yourself). Many of the libraries we write share common code among them, and could be grouped into a bundle of libraries with similar code, functionality, and usage. These would be perfect to use drivers for.

New Javascript Library

We’ve known about this for quite some time, and it’s nice to see it finally come to life and make its way into the CodeIgniter core. Now you’ll be able to dynamically implement Javascript using PHP.

The new Javascript library is a driver (explained above). It currently has just one child, jquery. But, this will allow you to build much more elegant jquery code for your application without as much hassle.

I’m going to write a post specifically about using the new javascript library next week, so stay subscribed to the rss for that!

Plugins are Gone

Yes, Ellislab have give plugins the heave-ho in favour of helpers. I was never a fan of plugins to be fair, and I tried to avoid using them at all costs. It’s quite nice to see that things are being ‘removed’ from this new version of CodeIgniter as well as added. At least we know that Ellislab are determined to keep CodeIgniter as a ‘lean’ and fast framework rather than some of the bulkier overweight ones that are currently available.

Code Hosting Moved

For a few years Ellislab have used a subversion system to develop CodeIgniter, but now they’ve dropped it in favour of Mercurial, a much leaner version control system. The code will be available on bitbucket, where you can download the latest bleeding edge version, or specific tags (versions such as 1.7.0).

With bitbucket, we can now fork CodeIgniter much more easily, apply fixes, and then suggest that it be added back into the core.

To Summarize

There’s no shortage of things to get excited about with CodeIgniter 2.0. I’m most excited about application packages and drivers. I could think of so many clients with code that could use these features.

Remember to keep a close eye on the CodeIgniter project now. It looks like this could really begin to move at a faster pace.

Since the announcement that ExpressionEngine 2.0 would be built on CodeIgniter, there was a great deal of buzz regarding CodeIgniter developers producing more ExpressionEngine products as a ‘paid-for’ product. Indeed, this has started to happen; Jamie Rumbelow recently released Taggable, a folksonomy plugin for EE 2.0. There’s also been some discussions about building great CodeIgniter libraries and releasing them as paid-for products.

I know that when I rebuild my CodeIgniter libraries, I could sell them for say $10 – $20 a pop. But I won’t. That’s a promise. My code will remain free, and always will. I understand that releasing premium ‘paid-for’ code can be a very lucrative business model, since it’s very much a form of passive income rather than active income. But it just doesn’t feel like ‘me’. I like that whatever I release can be used by anyone, regardless of circumstance. And that way, my work gets a wider distribution. My name becomes more well known, and this opens up more opportunities for me.

I believe in free. I believe in open-source. Almost everything I’ve learned has come from the open-source world. CodeIgniter has helped me build a career, pay my mortgage, and buy gadgets. Just because something’s free, doesn’t mean it’s without value. I know that open-source software has real value, both for individuals to learn, and for companies to build great quality, successful commercial applications.

…Give as freely as you have received!
- Matthew 10:8 (NLT)

Although I give away my code for free, it’s actually responsible for my income too. By releasing this code, I receive emails almost daily asking about my freelance services. Lots of these requests are to build applications based around my free code. So, free code and open-source really can be a good business idea. There’s an old business model that says, give something away, then charge to extend or support it.

“Hi Elliot
I know you from your CI stuff, having used a couple of your bits and pieces in the past and…”

Right now, my major client hired me back in August/September to implement my facebook connect library into their application. Once this work was complete, they asked my to carry on working for them on other areas of the application. Right now, I’m developing almost all of their new functionality and re-factoring old code for them. Releasing the facebook connect library was responsible for gaining a fantastic client.

There is though, the ‘cost of free’. Free code costs time, effort, and more importantly, passion. When I first decided to release free code, I wasn’t at all prepared for the time I’d need to dedicate to supporting it, updating it, and improving it. People still used it, and thanked me for it, but I knew it just wasn’t ‘good enough’. If you’re thinking about releasing open-source code, time is the biggest cost. And not just coding. Support takes up a great deal more time than the actual coding.

So, with the new versions of my libraries in the works, I’ve decided to look into something that I’ve never thought about doing before. Accepting donations. The thing about donations, is that whenever I think about accepting them, I think about the homeless guys I’d pass on Camden High Street each day on the way to work when I lived in London. I don’t want to seem like a charity, because I’m not. I earn my living from clients, and using my expertise.

There is a middle ground though. Something which I think is a nice idea, and for now, more of an experiment.

I know the value of my work, and the time it saves people. I also know that people like to say ‘thanks’, and I get emails regularly stating that notion. So, if you’ve used my code, and it’s really saved you some time and money, you can say thanks in a more physical way if you like. (No, not with sexual favours), but by buying me something from a wish-list.

For a change, I’ve decided to create a wish-list that isn’t just full of tech books. I love music, gaming, and reading, so there’s a real mix of things in it, with prices that range from $5 – $60.

My Wish-List »

To summarize, I will never charge for my code. I love that people are able to download it, learn, adapt it, and re-release it. The new versions of my libraries are really coming along, and I’m looking forward to releasing them. If you’d like to say thanks, then here’s one way to do it. And of-course, I always love to receive emails and tweets with thanks. They really do keep me going, and remind me of why I do this.

I’d encourage everyone to release open-source code. It’s a great way of giving back to a thriving community.