I’ve been wondering about the best way to handle memberships within a physical environment, such as a shop. I want to be able to allocate services to that membership and then when that person comes into the shop to redeem an allocated service, be able to record it and have it come off the total.

This creates a few head scratching problems.

1) People sign up to memberships on different days of the month, which means, simply re-allocating the services say, on the 1st of each month, wouldn’t work. Amending each by hand, would be a no-go. I want the memberships to be handled by GoCardless via Direct Debit but GoCardless can’t tell what we’re allocating it against, of course.

2) I want them to take away a physical thing i.e a card. The card can be linked to a barcode reader but probably better for it to just have an individual membership number that is printed, then linked through to a database against that number, rather than another piece of software?

3) Is it best to just build a database for these members and have staff tick off allocations as they happen and re-allocate, somehow, on a given date?

There are plenty of “loyalty-based” systems (handheld systems that read the cards themselves!), but they seem a bit over-engineered for what I’m looking for. Probably really easy to all you ROR devs out there. I’m left head scratching and looking to technology to answer it. Any help, greatly appreciated.

So, I’ve made no secret that I’ve headed in a different direction recently, starting up my own actual “thing” and enjoying every second of it. It has enabled me to slow down and enjoy my client work even more. As the new venture has a physical presence, we need staff, and over the last month have gone through the pleasures and pains of recruiting.

Well, that’s something you’re not usually exposed to in the web world as a freelancer. It’s been quite a roller coaster. At the time of writing this, there’s been over 100 job applications. As much as the volume of entrants surprised me, I was more surprised by the quality of the applications, and not in a good way. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some tremendous applicants, but the more applications flooded in, the angrier I got.

I was very fair on the job application, I don’t need an endless CV, I’m more interested in whether you can do the job beautifully and have a lovely personality to go with it. I also stated that both written and verbal English skills were of the utmost importance. You’d think that would be a clue, right? Wrong.

Here’s the list of things I’d personally say, to watch out for when applying for any job, because I’ve been on the flip side of that piece of paper now and can tell you the frustrating mistakes I’ve seen over and over.

1) If your job is public facing, whether that be via email or telephone, your new potential boss is going to be looking at your grammar and writing skills. Not just looking, scrutinising. At the very least, keep that spell checker close at hand.

2) If the application asks you “why do you want to work at *workplace*” they’re not looking necessarily for your personal reasons for getting out of your current job that you hate – which is what most applicants wrote about. Instead, look into the company, concept or model and find something about what they can offer you that appeals to you.

3) Don’t copy and paste answers from the internet. Especially don’t leave “best answer chosen by asker was:” in the application form (that actually happened). Your tone of voice never matches what you copy and paste and can be seen a mile off. You’ve just made yourself look silly.

4) Only list relevant qualifications. You wouldn’t believe the qualifications I’ve read through only to wonder how on earth they are relevant to the job at hand. One applicant even listed all their dance trophies. Keep it on topic.

5) Be careful about having an open Facebook profile. Before the applications started flooding, I was looking up every single applicant on Facebook to see what other information I could glean. One person who stated in their form they were “proficient on a Mac” had written, not 10 hours prior, that she was “so bad with technology (she) could barely turn on her iPad.” not exactly a confidence booster.

6) Don’t jump questions. The application form I put together was fairly short. There were questions on there that could, theoretically be jumped. They especially wanted to jump the “salary expectation” question for some reason. I then made it a “required” field so that it couldn’t be jumped and yep, you guessed it – the amount of application forms that then came back with a single character in there or just jumble to get them past submission, was quite absurd. If it’s in the application form, it’s there for a reason – don’t jump it.

7) Inject personality. There was a question that read “If you are called to interview, are there any special provisions we need to make for you?” – the amount of people who took this as an invitation to inject some personality, was quite funny. On the better applications it almost became a ‘given’ that something funny would await. Another applicant listed that the best thing about her previous employer was “they had nice cake on a Friday.” – sometimes a small giggle is exactly what the reviewer needs and makes you stand out from a large crowd.

8) Read everything properly. Twice if necessary. I placed an advert on a third-party job board, this advert read, in the first paragraph, “please don’t submit applications here via email – only applications submitted via our electronic form will be considered” – what happened? 8/10 applications came through via email, with a typical CV and cover letter. If you can’t read and follow instructions, it doesn’t give me much confidence as a potential employer.

9) Research the company or concept. It only takes a few minutes. We no longer have to trapse to the library and get out a book, it’s at your fingertips. The amount of people who wrote things that were completely incorrect was bizarre. One person stating that she wanted to work at the new business because “(we) already had stores in America” of which, we have none. A little research will never do you any harm and certainly will get you through the paper sift.

So, nothing groundbreaking at all and what would seem to many, outwardly, as common sense, but with so many people out of work, I wanted to be transparent as to why certain applications got turned down. Most of the time, it was because they fell into one of the above traps. Traps that are easily avoidable.

I’ve been quiet. I know. It’s been a mixture of some very demanding client work and some personal musings over what will make me happy, both imminently, and in the future, and then making that happen.

For a while, I’ve become quite obsessed with the notion of blending physical and digital together. I’ve often used the analogy, it’s like a builder being able to completely makeover a house, with only the skill set he has. The sense of accomplishment and achievement one must get from this would be immense. In fact, I know it is, as that’s exactly what my Dad did with our family home back in the 80’s.

In a digital capacity, I’ve seen my own skill sets develop and change over the years, even though I’m still only 29, I feel like I’ve been through all the era’s of web design; the tiny pixel fonts, table-based, and so on – I now carry quite an arsenal of various different skill sets in the digital capacity, some, undoubtedly, more polished than others, but still – skills none the less. I love working for clients, especially clients who absolutely get what I do – but, I’ve also wanted to plough some of my energy into something I can call my own. I think, judging by others who have been in the industry a similar amount of time, you eventually reach that point, naturally.

A couple of weeks back, I took the plunge. I leased some space. At the moment, I can’t tell you what for because the paperwork is still going through, but its purpose is for something very different to what I do at the moment, as it’s for a specific service-based industry. A service that I don’t carry the skills for, but I don’t feel that’s important. It’s been done purposefully, so that I’m not tied to the shop in a working capacity and I still continue to keep the thing I love – being part of the web industry.

My days are still spent with my clients, but come 6ish everyday, I down-tools for clients and pick up on my own personal stuff. It’s already had some profoundly benefitting effects, on both personal and client work. I’ve afforded myself the luxury (and in my eyes, it is a luxury!) of working on my own stuff. The sense of rejuvenating creativity I’ve felt has really helped pick me up, after last year proving to be a difficult personal year – it’s good to have something that makes me leap out of bed in the mornings again. I also think, when you’ve lost something so precious and dear to you, your entire world flips, and the barrier of what is scary drops. A cliché, but you do realise that you’ll never be poor as long as you have great friends and family around you.

The change in me, personally, has been quite noticeable. I’ve found I have more concentration for my client work, and equally, can flip to personal stuff at the end of the day with as much energy as I have at the start of a working day. All in all, I’m feeling happier and my work is better for it.

So, with the new venture, it’s amazing what skill sets I’ve already been able to put to good use, and new things to learn, that I’ve never tried before, like CAD software for interior shop designs – that’s been very interesting. With my existing toolkit though, I’ve personally been through the branding, web design, multi-device design, email design, tons of print-based graphic design and most importantly customer design processes…and that’s just for starters – it’s a wonderfully bumpy road, filled with great memories in some instances, and proving that just like learning to ride a bicycle, there’s some skills you never forget.

I will be documenting the whole process – which will very much be done from the point of view of blending our skill sets as digital designers with stuff that exists in the physical world. I hope you’ll come along with me for the journey, goodness knows – I’m going to need some moral support – I’m pretty sure my friends think I’m bonkers.

Josh Long, my partner in crime on Happy Monday – sent me his book ‘Execute’ a few months back. I opened the beautifully presented book, saw a nice hand-written note from Josh and started to read. Back then, I found it very hard to concentrate on anything due to a personal tragedy that had happened – I found myself reading the first chapter over and over again, hoping the words jumping around the page would make sense. I closed the book and mentally said “that’s for another day…”.

In the meantime, I’d been speaking to Josh at various points via Skype. Josh had pointed out that an entire paragraph of the book had been duplicated and now the book was printed, he seemed disappointed but still with the lovely nature I admire him for, shrugged it off and said “ah well”. After finishing the book a week ago last Monday, I think this duplicated paragraph perfectly illustrates the ethos of the book, I’ll come onto that in a little bit.

The book itself is wonderful. Its format, reminded me of Rework by 37Signals – which is perfect for me. Succinct, shorter style chapters, and a lesson to be learnt and applied at the end of each chapter. I read Execute, almost entirely, on a train journey home from my iOS Workshop.

The combination of the narration from Josh and the practical advice from Drew, really makes this book a killer read. It talks about real-world problems and how to overcome these and push through a project to completion – fast, or as us Brits like to say, without dilly-daddling.

That duplicated paragraph spoken about earlier – is towards the end of the book. I got to it whilst finishing up the final chapters in the bath one morning. I tilted my head to the side as I recognised this was the mistake Josh referred to, but then realised it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the book whatsoever. If anything, it’s a lesson to be learnt that although the book may not be 100% perfect, the fact it was created and shipped in 8 days, and now being enjoyed all over the world was a lesson to all of us. Mistakes are forgiven – don’t let potential mistakes hinder you from shipping something that brings far greater enjoyment than tiny mistakes that may be contained within. Your audience is always forgiving, you’re only human afterall.

Execute can be purchased either as a hardcover ($29) or eBook ($15).

Six months ago, something happened to me that I kept quiet. Some of my best friends in the industry knew it was happening and tried to help as much as they could. I started writing a post back then about what happened, I got halfway through and found it too much. Coming back, maybe with a stronger disposition because of what happened with my Mum, I now want to share what occurred. It’s come to my attention that there’s a lot of females in this industry suppressing stuff that is happening to them, for fear of backlash or just wanting a quiet life. It also might answer some questions about another point. I’ll come to that later.

Here’s what I started to write back in August…

It’s with great sadness I have to speak up about something. I’m not sad myself, nor am I particularly hurt – but being scared into silence is not an option. The reason I’m sad is that the person involved with what I’m about to speak up about, could be a member of our community. Infact at the moment, everything is pointing to the fact they are. They are currently feeding off the suppression of this topic, so I’m writing publicly about it.

This week – someone decided to upload fake porn pictures of me to the internet – when I say fake I don’t mean my head stuck on someone’s body, but lookalikes or in some cases, just blonde girls with blue eyes and terrible taste in underwear. I digress. This is someone with far too much time on their hands and someone with a definite grudge. I’ve taught myself over the years to take the rough with the smooth and develop a thick skin, I’ve been free of online trouble for a while and rightly or wrongly, I was kind of expecting my run of luck to end. To say it caught me off guard, would be a lie, but to see how low someone would stoop, did. However, it’s amazing how resilient and detached you can be when you know you’ve been that boring your entire life that you’ve never taken nude pictures of yourself.

The interesting thing about what this individual did was show themselves as wanting to try and damage my professional integrity with blatant trolling. It all started a week ago from the date of writing this. I started to receive emails from creepy guys that eventually traced back to a site where various pictures had been posted to. The pictures were uploaded alongside my personal email address, (old) hometown and a screenshot of my Twitter account. There was also an open forum for comments at the bottom, which I’m sure you can imagine the type of things posted there.

This is where I stopped in August, and here is where I will continue on in my words now…

The timing of everything was carefully executed, they knew I was speaking at one of our industry’s best known conferences, ‘An Event Apart’ – they started to try and spam the feed ‘A Feed Apart’ on the day of my talk – they then tried, unsuccessfully, to post to the ‘An Event Apart’ Facebook feed during my talk, they setup a fake Twitter account and tried to at-reply my employers for that conference as well as high-profile twitter users I was associated with, to ensure they knew about the pictures and their existence.

If you were at ‘An Event Apart’ in Austin last year, you might remember Jeffrey jumping up on stage and giving one of the best, off-the-cuff speeches I’ve ever heard, purely because he had only been told seconds before what was likely to happen during my talk. He said (paraphrased) “The feed is prone to trolls and spam at the best of times, at any point today, if you see anything derogatory about any of our speakers, please ignore it, do not engage with them. The conference is about everyone in this room, not outside, let’s keep it that way”. At that point, I couldn’t believe it had even gone through my head to have a stiff upper lip and try and soldier on without them knowing what was happening behind the scenes. I felt ashamed; that I was almost letting them down by being a speaker and bringing all this hassle to their conference. During my talk, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried at what the hundreds of faces, lit up by glowing laptops, were seeing or reading about me or what might have slipped the net. A feeling I would never wish on my worst enemy. Jeffrey, Eric and the team handled it with such aplomb and such care towards me as well, I’ll be forever thankful.

We never found out who did it.

This brings me to my last point. There’s many questions around why there aren’t more females speaking in this industry. I can tell you why, they are scared. Everytime I jump on stage, I get comments, either about the way I look, or the fact that I’m the female, the token, the one they have to sit through in order for the males to come back on again. One conference, I even had a guy tweet something derogatory about me, not 30 seconds into my talk, only for me to bring up the point he had berated me for not bringing up, not a minute later – which caused him to have to apologise to my face after public backlash. I’ve had one guy come up to me in a bar and say (after explaining he didn’t like my talk)… “no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys”. I could write a book on inappropriate things that have been said to me at conferences about girls in the industry, so much so, it’s become a running joke with fellow speakers. I know other girls who could also chip in a fair few chapters but, underneath the humour sometimes found in these situations, lies a very real problem.

It’s no great secret that girls are a minority in this industry, you only have to look at the queues for the toilets at any conference, however, it’s forgotten that it’s not about female speakers, it’s about finding female speakers who have enough of a thick skin to want to stand up infront of an audience of twitter-trigger-happy males and public speak. That’s an entirely different kettle of fish. Then ontop – when you finally feel comfortable with speaking, you get put into a big black pot and tarnished with the label “same old face”. This happened to me on my third ever speaking engagement, third? I was tarnished as a “same old face”. Since then it’s become water off a ducks back – I’m not going to let a label stop me from developing and growing my speaking skills, I’m by no means perfect and still have a lot to learn. We should be encouraging anyone who shows an aptitude or love for sharing their knowledge with the community.

The wheels are in motion for something I hope will address this, I will share soon and hope you will all support me in this venture.