March has been a busy month with me going back to permanent employment and starting a new job at intelliflo. Finishing my last contract. Finishing a freelance project and starting another one.

Work

If you missed my previous months' notes - I got a new job! Over the past year, I spent a lot of time thinking about work and the future - with IR35 looming and all the other things that the government is doing or will do that will affect contractors - plus the fact that I now owe £8k loan I had to take out to be able to pay my corporate taxes - I decided to go back to permanent employment.

So it's been three weeks at my new job now and it's going great - have already got down to some coding after a couple of weeks of mandatory training and the setting up of the brand new laptop and local development environment.

Considering it's a new process for me and the business with new kit and remote IT support - I think it went very well.

I'm also part of a great diverse team which I'm looking forward to getting to know better.

Funnily enough - my first piece of work was to apply the new company branding to the project I worked on when I first worked at intelliflo as a contractor back in 2017 - their Developer Hub and App Store.

Freelance

March saw the launch of the new website for Property with Potential. The new website uses TailwindCSS and AlpineJS - two frameworks that I had never used before. I also used 11ty to build the templates ready for the client to implement with their backend tech stack.

I am pleased with how it turned out and so is the client. Even if it did take longer than planned - but we did add extra work; but I also ended up having to take on a contract at the same time.

New Project

I also started another website build project - Surbiton Tyre & Wheel. I decided to stick with TailwindCSS and off course 11ty. 🖤

So far I have coded up all the different components - cards plus variants, header, footer and main navigation etc.

Then I started refining all the components - making sure they work well in small screen devices as well as larger ones.

The most complex component is the main navigation - as it has three levels of links. Top-level links followed by two sets of sub nav links.

Normally I would have found a codepen and just changed the code to fit my requirements but this time I decided I would code the entire thing from scratch including some basic JS for showing and hiding the menu on mobile as well as the sub-nav links.

Personal

I was on a podcast!! It was my first time being on one - it was great fun - but I was a tad nervous. I haven't been able to listen to it through yet - cringing at the sound of my voice. 😬

You can listen to it here - Make Life Work - 5: Tingle of Completion

Car

Since I've been home for over a year now I haven't needed to use my car in that time - in fact, a month into the first lockdown my road tax was due so I decided to SORN my car (SORN means you don't pay the road tax - but you cannot drive your car on public roads).

Now that I have gone back to permanent employment and it's fully remote I won't be making those long journeys to a contract like I used to do. So the car won't get used very often when life goes back to some normality as we had before covid (BC times) - so all this is to say that my lovely red Mercedes-Benz A-Class is for sale. 😢

This meant I needed to get the car taxed, serviced and MOT'd - and my insurance also needed to be renewed. I reduced my mileage on the insurance to 6k per annum - which is the lowest you can choose to reduce he price a bit.

But selling a car when you live this far out and during a pandemic means zero interest in the car. Hopefully, when restrictions are lifted and it's safer to do so, there will be more interest.

🎧 Listening

📖 Reading

That's it

That's it for March's monthly notes - it's been a busy month with starting a new permanent job and finishing off freelance work - meaning I've been working more hours a day which meant I've had less time for reading, listening to podcasts, blogging and even watching TV.

Until next month - have a great one!

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