Finding yourself in a different country is interesting to say the least. There’s a whole new city to explore. New people to meet. Mistakes to make. Maps to learn. Transport to work out. In our case, we moved into a completely unfurnished apartment, so there was bed, sofa, blinds, kitchen stuff, table, desks, light fittings, all kinds of other stuff to work out as well. Ikea is confusing at the best of time, when you accidentally go around it backwards in German, it’s frankly terrifying. So I’ve been a bit remiss at blogging of late. 

I moved to Berlin on secondment from work in January, having spent a couple of weeks here in December last year. I immediately fell back in love with the place. Liam came to visit in early February, his first comment upon arriving was “it feels like coming home”. At that point, I knew that maybe it was time for us to leave London and embark on a new adventure in a new language in a different country.

I officially started work in Germany in late June, moving into our new apartment on June 26th. It’s the third floor of a building that’s stood for over a hundred years. I arrived and met the landlady for the first time the day before she’d arranged to meet a few others to view the flat. We got on, she offered me the flat there and then. 

I thought, living on the third floor and being a person with a disproportionately heavy bottom, I’d get fed up with the stairs in a couple of weeks. Hasn’t yet happened, which is nice.

Liam moved over in early July, we got a bed sorted after a slight accident with a dodgy Amazon seller and we’ve been quietly adding stuff to the apartment ever since. I’ve settled into work in Berlin, Liam has settled into a mix of learning German and meditating and all is well in the world.

But what next? We’re both of us slight drama junkies. We get bored if things stay the same. But we know that’s a bad thing and want to be more even in how we are as people. We spark off each other too much at the moment because we are all we have of each other, but we know we do it and why, which makes us better than we should be.

But what next? People question Liam because he’s not working, they seem unaware that it’s possible to not work and be happy, he doesn’t need to be in a constant state of either working or finding work to have a fulfilling life with direction. Moving to Berlin means he has the chance to do something different with his life, take a different path, the path less trodden, and his life is becoming richer because of it.

I’m a bit of a workaholic but I need to rechannel my energy somewhat, spend less time on the day job, engage more with new ideas outside of work. I’m still a geek at heart though, so I’m inventing new ways of making websites work better. One should always eat ones own dogfood, so I’ll be testing the ideas I’ve had on my own sites first, I just need to focus on doing it.

Freakcity is essentially dead right now. But there’s a growing dissatisfaction with Facebook and the other corporates owning your data. Industry pundits are claiming next year will be the year of community based social networks. Facebook is waning, but it has waned before and bounced back stronger, it will be interesting to see what kills it. Industry pundits claiming next year will be the year of community based social networks seem unaware that that’s actually where we came from. But I’ll happily watch from the sidelines and see what happens.

So I have three ideas I shall try and grow. Firstly, ScottJoyce.net - my photography website. It’s a small site, essentially consiting of two pages and hastily pulled together and hacked apart MooTools plugins that give the impression of a large site full of gorgeousness. I’ll be rebuilding this from scratch on node.js and using my ObjectJS Javascript framework. A first proper real world test for it. Then, once completed,  Freakcity X - a reimagining of Freakcity from the ground up - a new platform based on ObjectJS called FractalJS - running on Node.js, using FractalJS to share objects between the front and back ends. Freakcity is Ten years old next June, so I figure it’s a good enough excuse to recreate it. I think there’s still room in the world for a community of geeky misfits, but the existing site is suffering from a whole bunch of things, not least of which is that it still runs on Windows Server 2003... I’ve modified it so Apache serves the content and Windows is relegated to an app server, which sped it up somewhat, but still it’s not great.

Ten years ago, I sat in a hotel room in Tampa Bay, Florida, and thought up the idea of Freakcity. Now I’m sat in a hotel room in Poland, planning out the new one. Hotels <3 rock.

I wasn’t a very good coder at the start of Freakcity. Now I’m much better diciplined, will see if I can build us something better. 

Then the third thing. Gay social networking is a bit rubbish. It could be better. Straight social networking is also a bit rubbish. Imagine if facebook was better? I have a plan...

Also, I’m gonna be building an app. This may work

I promise I may blog more often. I also promise I may fix a few bugs in the existing code too.

Yesterday before breakfast, I poked the pirateiser with an idea - now you can whack a URL into it and it’ll piratise an entire website. Probably. A bit buggy, but fun to look at

So I’m in Poland, for the most part watching games people writing bad/really bad Javascript and I’m considering contributing some bits and bobs to the open source community to make it better, because I’ve been coding Javascript pretty much since day 1 and I’ve gotten quite good at it in the last few years and I think, now’s the time to try and make something.