Siu Lun

Thanks for all the job offers recently, however I’m officially going to announce today that I’ve taken the decision to resign from all jobs and agency work permanently.

My recent experience in one of the top 4As agency in Hong Kong will be the last. I would like to clarify somethings though as to why I’ve taken this decision.

Since I moved from the UK to HK to start my own business, I’ve actually already decided not to work in an agency. I was in a digital agency in UK – a very good one I might add.

I just realise during my time in the UK that doing websites for clients is not a sustainable industry. Actually I realised that in my 2nd year of university, when I came up with a business plan to which I’ll execute once I leave my current position. There is so much more potential even now in web development than agency work it is much more satisfactory and rewarding to do so. The only reason I joined an agency in the UK was to further my development skillset as it allows me to work for many different clients with different requirements, and I succeed, together with the agency I was with.

In my previous post, I took on the opportunity in HK’s 4As agency to try and do something significant. Changing the web development landscape in Hong Kong, well little did I know the core crux of the matter of today’s web development landscape is not only because of cheap clients, but also the quality of people as well as people’s attitudes, this is also made worst in the 4As environment, to which is a different topic entirely.

I gave up. Yes I gave up, it was not worth perusing the path any longer, particularly when they installed somebody higher up that is supposed to be the head of digital with no technical or digital agency background or knowledge. There was no way to win this game the way I see it, that is not to say he may not be able to achieve the goal for the agency, but certainly will not be how I envisioned it to be.

Hence, from now on, I won’t take on anymore jobs and agency type work, nor would I work for any ordinary Hong Kong companies. That’s not to say I’ve given up on Hong Kong’s web development scene, it’s just that rather than use what HK has, I’m starting from scratch, building it the way I see it working. Be a real digital producer.

During my journey up till now, I’ve met many many similar minded people, and it comforts me to think that I’m not alone in my thinking, my actions. To all those that truly cares about the web development scene of Hong Kong. I sincerely hope that we’ll be able to work together towards a brighter future for us. Different in fields we may be, our way of work, mentality and thoughts are similar. I wish you all good luck in the future. Thanks for all the support various people have given me throughout my journey. All the best.

CS5 is out, and I’ve been looking at the demos of various features of the new suite.

The most amazing demo I’ve seen ever is the intelligent image generation feature to ‘fill in’ the gaps.

There is still probably some flaws from the system, but this means I’m pretty much not dependent on ‘creatives’ to retouch my images.

In terms of the most wanted feature that I’m looking for though is Flash. Flash Builder and Catalyst is shipping with the Master Collection! No longer do we have to shell out extra for Flash Builder. A nice touch, but guttered I just spent lots of money on FDT.

FDT would most probably still be my first choice as it runs on Eclipse and I do pretty much all my development work no matter what language using Eclipse.

I’ve been looking into building a sample Facebook Connect app recently for experimentation and showcase use.

One thing I encountered in recent projects is the seemingly slow speed of profile images loaded via Flash.

The one thing that I’ve found that is a potential ‘bottleneck’ to this problem is the way Facebook Connect is used on the site.

Essentially the fundamental difference from our recent projects is that we used PHP client side library which proxies all information into the server before being served to client side. Facebook provides a javascript based implementation as well.

Based on the above information you can basically tell that proxying is a speed bottleneck and an inefficient way to present what’s essentially the user’s information to the user only. Javascript solves the issue as it is a request from the client’s browser to Facebook directly.

Based on this theory, it should be obvious that php client library should only be used if the server has to manipulate, store or doing any information processing before the information is presented to the end user. Javascript library should be used whenever information should be presented to the end user first.

I’m in the middle of proving this theory. Will update once result is known.