Every business owner around the world has to address the GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation ) which becomes active on 25th May 2018. If your business is based in the EU or provides services to EU citizens ( even if your business is based outside of the EU ), then you have steps to take with your business to ensure every piece of customer data you hold and your processes in dealing with that data are compliant with GDPR.
Weblake is supporting its customers primarily with their websites and its respective Privacy Policy. We are creating their specific Privacy Policy via the ‘iubenda’ service which is backed by a legal team that keep the policy wording up to date automatically. In addition to creating and implementing these Privacy Policies for our customers, we are also ensuring that our customers have the correct Cookie Consent directive in place. Indirectly, the support is there for our customers to help them understand the non-website related steps that are required to ensure they are GDPR compliant. This is a minefield and specific to each business. Each businesses Privacy Policy is also specific to them and their data activities. No template is suitable now. No one-size fits all. Those days of “let’s copy that Privacy Policy and paste it into our website” are over. Generic is out! Specific and transparent is where it’s at.
The ICO website contains a wide range of extensive guides and documentation that distills this new Regulation into achievable and understandable actions that are required by every business that has to adhere to this new Regulation. To that end, I share a great 12 step guide to GDPR and links to relevant and useful resources.
It will be interesting to see how the landscape will look post 25th May 2018 and GDPR. I can only imagine the immense work and investment that has been required by corporations to adhere to this programme. Will they all do it correctly? Let’s see.
Moreover, let’s see how quickly we see claims being placed against businesses out there for non-GDPR compliance. I can imagine there are consumers out there as I write, sat in their ivory towers, poised, ready to lunge at the chance to claim what is reported to be potentially millions of pounds in compensation.
I am supporting my customers and helping them protect themselves from the acts of consumers trying to make a quick buck.
It’s been a struggle at times, not for the want of trying though. As a self taught coder of XHTML and CSS way back in the good ol’ days of WYSIWYG Dreamweaver the bug and excitement for learning more has grown exponentially ever since.
Even though I come from a graphic design background ( way before tech ( I am not just pre-tech I am pre-historic clearly ) my day to day activity involved marker pens / paper and print. The move to coding was and is unbeatable. Part of that attraction I am sure is the difficulty and challenge it brings to learn this wonderful world of web development, with so many choices of language, frameworks, front-end, back-end, devops, UX and on and on.
So not being an ‘academic’ and a naturally gifted individual in the grey matter I was determined to gain traction and make a name for myself, in my own little world of mastering JavaScript.
The journey so far
I have spent a fair amount of money and time so far on JavaScript e-books, reading and understanding ( or so I thought ). With intense enthusiasm and determination I have ‘battled on’, each time making some progress in places, only to try a different approach and find either a different way, or thinking that I have been walking the wrong path. It’s been a couple of years of study. It’s all been enjoyable but I felt like I was treading water a lot of the time.
I saw something and couldn’t wait for it to launch
There is a genius and an incredibly infectious ‘smiler’ that goes by the name of Zac Gordon. I had no prior knowledge of Zac until I came across a snippet of a Treehouse course but then an announcement of an upcoming online course for ‘Learning JavaScript Deeply‘. This phrase was of course coined by the mighty Matt Mullenweg, the centre of WordPress. My business Weblake had pivoted to specialise in WordPress a while before.
WordPress began to move in all the right directions towards becoming more than a simple blogging platform. All of a sudden we saw development roadmaps that were decoupling the component of WordPress and allowing for incredible functionality into the future. It was becoming even more attractive and even more exciting.
I loved JavaScript and I loved WordPress and the two were coming together! Boom!
I just couldn’t wait for Zac’s new JavaScript For WordPress course. The earlybird offer was snatched out of the nest and the weeks of waiting for launch of Zac’s course were agonising.
It was countdown and the day had arrived. The launch of the Javascript For WordPress course. It was everything I was expecting and within hours I had learned more that I had picked up in years of self study. Most definitely part of that progress was aided by the infectious ‘Zac accent’. You can actually hear him smiling as you listen to his narrative of his course videos. Even down to the sound effect of the content pages in the video shifting on, the whole package is designed beautifully. It’s impossible not to make progress with these ingredients.
If there was ever going to be a frustration, it was the fact I was moving through the course quicker than Zac could publish his new content. Being such a sought after educator and developer it was clear that Zac’s ambitious road map for the course had to deviate a little, but all for good reason. Success breeds success eh?
I wish my cashflow had been healthier at the time …
…as I would have taken part in Human Made’s ‘A Week Of REST’ last year. Knowing Zac was there as a tutor made the event for me but nah, just couldn’t afford it sadly.
But the best was yet to come!
The enthusiasm gained in this amazing world of JavaScript have led me to investigate the major and popular frameworks out there. Angular, React and now Vue. Also the world of Node.js has been gripped. Yet I come back to the ‘non academic’ in me… it will always be a challenge but I am sure also that I put additional pressure on myself to ‘get it right’. I keep ‘battling on’ to this day…
I mustn’t ever forget I am a designer first and foremost and classed myself as a frustrated developer in the past whilst Imposter Syndrome had fun with me. Those days are gone ( there’s another blog post in there somewhere ) so I am now a fully fledged ‘Developer with design skills’. I like that. It feels and sounds good. I am qualified!
So with this ongoing love of everything WordPress and JavaScript and the goodness of Zac Gordon’s teachings, we were recently blessed with a new Udemy WordPress Developer course ( there’s another blog post in there also ), but something eclipsed that as it was launched just before the Udemy course and that was a JavaScript For WordPress Summer Cohort. It looked almost too good to be true. Direct access to Zac via a Slack channel and monthly video calls with Zac and the group. All of this over the course of a year. A weekly checkin on Slack is also there to keep you on track.
Now I will make this perfectly clear, I am in absolutely no way affiliated with Zac, I am not receiving any type of commission of incentive for this review / post about Zac and his teachings / courses. I am purely wanting to ‘big up’ this great man who has an incredibly natural way of teaching. Zac has a natural and accessible way of making you feel valued and capable in what you are learning and achieving. I believe in credit where it is due, Zac deserves the credit and I also believe there are many many ‘designers’ out there that may feel overwhelmed or not worthy of moving into the world of web development and could benefit from reading this summary.
The Summer Cohort has been brilliant and we have only just begun. To sit at my laptop with my fellow Cohort students dotted around the world and us all have Zac appearing there in the same screen, talking to ‘us’ and addressing us all personally was actually beyond real in the first couple of video sessions, it’s still surreal third session in. This course was an investment. Yes it cost more than a Udemy or Eudonix course but that’s for good reason. To have direct access to Zac is worth the price of my investment ten fold. I have made incredible progress and not just progress but incredible understanding in JavaScript and vanilla JavaScript at that. I am finally ‘Learning JavaScript Deeply‘. Matt Mullenweg will be pleased.
So where now?
My next stop is the next check in with Zac and our Cohort next Monday, as much time as I can manage ( around my business, life and my commitment to being Design Lead for WordCamp London 2018 ) working through the rest of the course. I really look forward to the next video session and discussing progress as a group. Hearing my fellow JS students also making progress spurs me on further. We are all in this together.
I am so excited about the future, the future of me and my JavaScript Development career and the future of Zac’s JavaScript For WordPress course. Also so excited about the future of WordPress.
As I gain more confidence in my JS ability I will share more technical views and findings in my website. The ultimate goal here is to develop a Weblake JS app of some kind and that will happen I know, because I have the skills, knowledge and enthusiasm there in buckets.
I believe Zac has another enrollment coming soon for a Master Course Cohort. Absolutely do yourself a favour and invest in this fantastic programme. Please do reach out on this website or via Twitter if you want to ask me more privately. No strings. No commission, just thanks and admiration to Zac and his ‘infectious way’. All JS credit where it’s due. Thank you Zac for making this journey so damn exciting and enjoyable. So much learning and hunger for more!
Now I am off to perform some more deep learning of the beauty and intrigue that is JavaScript and how I can fit that into WordPress. It’s like Gin and Tonic. Lovely!
I had only ever worked with Windows when I moved Weblake into specialising in WordPress. This was a move that had transpired from my hitting rock bottom. The business was failing due to historical customers either going out of business or being acquired. The worst case scenario though was Weblake’s largest customer ( an agency who had become around 80% of the business revenue ( yes, yes, yes a bad place to be I knew that )) were also on the way out. They employed a ‘Digital Producer’ and I knew my days were numbered. It was the kick up the rear I needed really but it’s frightening I can tell you. But it also hurts ( a lot ) when that company that you pretty much were a permanent part of, moved mountains for and other customers projects aside for, don’t so much as give you a second of explanation or warning. Nothing, no compassion or any type of loyalty, thanks or forewarning. It taught me a huge lesson and one never to be repeated.
The first WordPress project
The first development project for me using WordPress was for a brand new customer and a customer that knew exactly what they wanted. And being in tech themselves knew a good performing website, more than the average user.
Something wasn’t working on Windows though. This was like watching paint dry, even though FastCGI was being implemented. "I wonder about Linux. Everyone in open source seems to use Linux but I know nothing about it. It might be time to learn".
So that’s what I did. Set out to self learn this new technology ( to me anyway ) and spent the next week dedicated to learning Ubuntu, command line and bash scripting. It didn’t take me long to realise I was working with something that left Windows in the dark for WordPress performance. It was one of those "…damn, I wish I had looked into this years ago". It’s never too late though eh?
Linux rocks
I really can’t see myself working with Windows technology again. The beauty of Linux and the command line, the control, the solidity, the community and the sheer performance of the Linux OS is just wonderful.
If you are reading this and have never tried the open source Linux OS take my word for it, you will never look back. It’s a little steep in terms of learning but once you begin to understand the mechanics it’s a joy to use and administer.
So where now?
Whilst my initial move into Linux was based around Ubuntu and Apache, my next move will be into the world of Nginx. My research suggests that Nginx leaves Apache standing. For web performance Nginx seems to be light years ahead of Apache, so that is where I am heading…
Watch this space…
Thank you to Thomas Kvistholt for this posts featured image Thomas Kvistholt
Every business owner around the world has to address the GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation ) which becomes active on 25th May 2018. If your business is based in the EU or provides services to EU citizens ( even if your business is based outside of the EU ), then you have steps to take with your business to ensure every piece of customer data you hold and your processes in dealing with that data are compliant with GDPR.