Personal

19 articles in this category

Taking new steps to become someone better linkedin
In the past 5 years I have been living my dream. I have been through a journey that far surpass all my dreams and I find myself in a position where I can look back with a happy smile and a heart filled with satisfaction. This is when I take the next step and try new things.
I started almost 5 years ago as a Neurowebdesigner and since then I have held positions as designer, tester, project manager and many more. I have worked with large and small companies and I have had the privilege to work with some of the best minds in the world. It's safe to say that I have been truly blessed being able to learn from such greatness.
As this summer begun I felt it was time for a change. For far to long have i restricted myself in terms of writing about my work, or rather the fields in which I do work as the work itself is mostly classified. I have my personal page where I so far have mixed personal topics with my professional topics. It has always bothered me a bit to not be able to have those separate and I have had a vision in my mind of what I want to do. 
Now it's time to make reality of that.
In the past few days I have started to build the new website and after almost a week of tinkering I feel I am closing in on something that resemble what I want. It's a big site and the concept of building it around hubs of information and not in the standard blog-like fashion still feel a bit strange, but in a good way.
I build this new site on Wordpress of course with Buddypress and BBpress as the community base, but it's the concept of hubs that makes it really fun to work with.
I have divided the site into my areas of interest: Code, Design, E-commerce, Leadership, Quality, Security, Strategy and Tech. These will be the focal points of the site and then each area will be divided into additional hubs. 
For example I have a hub under Code called Code IDE which list the different IDE's like Webstorm. This hub will act as a list, while the Webstorm Hub will be a full hub with ratings, news, videos and so on.
It's a bit abstract right now until I get things going, but I have the idea ready so now I just need to start adding content and fix the design. 
This new project that I call omniconsultant.se is just the first change of many coming my way this fall. I have another great surprise to share in a few weeks, but i need to keep it under wraps a little longer due to a promise. 
I will write here about the changes and if you feel like it, please follow me here or join me at omniconsultant.se. You can also follow Omniconsultant here on Linkedin and on Facebook of course.
So, until next time...have a great summer!

Written by: Jimi Wikman
Category: Personal
July 28, 2016
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454 views
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Fjord Stockholm - one of the greatest workplaces in the world. praise
I have been meaning to write this for a while now and as my energy start to come back I feel it's time to express my admiration for the amazing Fjord Stockholm office and the people working there.
I have had the pleasure of working not just with Fjord, but also sit with them in their Stockholm office for close to a year. In that time I have observed and learned a lot from how Fjord build their culture within the office and how it affect their work.
A workplace can be many things and how it is structured and decorated have a great impact on how the people working there feel. Not just about themselves and the workplace, but also how the company itself are perceived. So if you want to know what kind of company you are dealing with you can just take a stroll through their office.
As you probably know Fjord is a part of Accenture and for me that made things very interesting because Accenture is very strict as a company. A strict environment almost never fit a creative mind and Fjord is a melting pot of creativity, so how does that work for Fjord?
Well, Fjord have solved this by taking the best parts of Accentures high standards for security and their values and built it as a core of their work. This core is then surrounded by a setting for creativity that is just amazing! Every where you go you will find places to sit or interact with.
It can be a swing next to a window, a huge teddy bear that you can actually curl up in its lap. A VR set in the coffee area and kitchens that make for perfect work areas or places to chat for a while. Everything is carefully selected to be stylish and playful, but also as ways to trigger your minds creative processes even more.
There are always things to look at with an odd shape, creations made from strange materials and you can find places to sit and work all over the place and not just around the working areas. In short it is amazing!
On top of this very creative scenery you have people. People that are friendly, curious and oh so full of creativity and talent from all over the world. These people combined with the decoration of the office create an atmosphere that is very difficult to describe, but if you are a creative designer you probably just call it heaven.
I will miss the Fjord Stockholm office, but I will do my best to make sure the Claremont office I am just starting to get to know will be equally great, if not even more so! It is a challenge, but one well worth to take on because the work place is where most of us spend a majority of our time throughout life, so it should be amazing!
The Fjord Stockholm office have managed to create just such a working environment that truly make it one of the best working places in the world for creative creationists.
Well done Fjord Stockholm!

Written by: Jimi Wikman
Category: Personal
September 23, 2016
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435 views
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JWSE Year 2 - moving forward yet another year jwse 2.0
Today is my birthday. It is also the first birthday of this website after I converted it to use Invision Community. This last year have been filled with ups and downs, not just in life but the entire world seem to be having trouble finding it's footings. As I move into year two of the latest incarnation of this website it is time to find that footing again, at least for this website.
When I started the conversion last year it was just another experiment. A way to try out the good old Invision Community again. Something I have done on and off since 2002 or so, but never really stuck with. What I found was that Invision Community was working very well for me now. The many years had matured Invsion Community as a product and as I got deeper into the template system it really appealed to me as it allowed me a creative freedom that not even Wordpress can match.
In this last year I have created hundreds of blogposts, hundreds of videos have been added and I have recreated my entire swedish blog again. I have built several databases such as the Awesome People section and My Projects section. I have also had a few setbacks such as loosing all graphics for some strange mishap at my hosting company and also had my account ravaged by virus due to the presence of my old Wordpress site. This has since been corrected and I am now on a new webhost and I have setup an AWS hosting for images (which also cost me dearly due to a script malfunction, but that has since been corrected).
Over all it has been a good year, filled with exploration and learning. My passion for front end development have been reignited and my passion for design has also returned. The writing comes and goes, but overall I feel good about it and i feel that it is far easier to write using Invision Community than it is to use Wordpress. It suits me better I think.
 
Moving forward
Last year I wrote some goals for this website in the form of short term, medium term and long term goals. These goals are still valid and while I have created the databases and I have a design that works for at the moment, I will rebuild this design again as part of the 4.5 upgrade.
Short Term Goals
My short term goals is to upgrade the site to version 4.5. With that comes some new features, but the main goal is to reset the structure and design  bit. I have played around and experimented a bit in the last year and it is time to clean that up now. So the first short term goal I have is to build a new design, recreating the current design for the 4.5 version. This includes building some new templates that I need for certain databases, but also organize the databases properly.
One of those templates I want to build is to recreate the block design I currently use for this blog. It is based from a purchased application and as much as I like it, I do not need the functionality. I also want to build a design I can understand fully and can control rather than relying on someone elses design. I also want to experiment a bit and use css grid, flexbox and maybe even currentColor, which will be superfun I think.
The second template is a listing template that I will use for things like My Education and if I decide to add a reference feature, like the CSS reference on w3schools. It will be a very simple template, but very useful for different types of listings.
Another short term goal I am working on right now is to update all the projects in My Projects and rebuild My Gallery section.
Medium Term Goals
The medium term goals will be to create the information for guest blogging and about this site.  About this site is not just for the visitors as I also need to define what this site is for myself. I also need to figure out who I build the site for so I know what to create for them. For this purpose I am starting to create sort of a personas gallery for myself, which is actually already helping me focusing the content a bit.
Guest blogging is probably not going to take off that much in year 2, but I still want to make sure it is easy to understand how to do it. Having a page and instructions on what it means to guest blog is just a first step however. I still need to build a few things to make it valuable for the guest bloggers so I can repay them for their contributions. I have create a new user group just for authors and I am considering to build a new database for them as well.
With the My Projects on it's feet I will take another look at My Roles. I realize that it is quite easy to build a CV - like structure by connecting to the My Projects database. So I will build a new template for this later this fall and combine that with acual CV's as time permit.
Long Term Goals
The long term goals for year 2 will be to create more content that is helpful. What I mean by that is that much of what I write here is mostly for me. It is news that I think is interesting and my own thoughts mostly. While that is good and fine, I also want to make sure that I add content that can help and inspire. Things like short tutorials, downloadable graphics and inspiring posts on new tools or practices is probably more useful for a visitor, so I will focus a bit extra on that in year 2. It takes a bit more time and energy, but I think it will be worth it.
I get a lot of questions on how I built this site, so I am going to write more about that. I know how hard it can be to get started with Invision Community as the information is a bit scattered, so if I can help people get started, then that would be great.
Overall the long time goal is still to provide useful information and resources to make people want to come here. The long time goal is also to use this site as a way to keep my toes wet in the front end development area and the design area primarely.
These long term goals always balance against me having fun. This site can never be a source of stress, that would defeat it's puprpose. Slow and steady progress over perfection as time permit is key. As is doing this with love, not obligation because this is a website created to satisfy my need to write and create. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Onwards to year 2 with new adventures and discoveries!

Written by: Jimi Wikman
Category: Personal
July 27, 2020
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451 views
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Building again and changing hosting company plans
Every summer, almost, it is time for reflection and build something new. This year is no exception, but it is a little bigger change that I look at. At the same time, I have changed the web host because I had some worries at Oderland that I try to figure out.
By a small coincidence when I still switched web hosting, I stopped in the Invision Community again. I tried it a year ago on my .com site, but felt that it didn't really get as I wanted. When I looked at it, it felt really good, maybe because I didn't try as much as I did last time. It was also the reason why I decreased the ambition here on the site after I pulled away a little.
Now there is a lot left to do, but so far it feels good. The functions are quite ok already directly out of the box, although it should be configured a bit. I have built a beginning of a project portfolio and a new blog. It is very basic so far, but I think it is good.

The biggest challenge now is to think about whether I want to drive in English or Swedish in the future. I made a choice long ago to drive in Swedish, but in an increasingly international situation, I am thinking of returning to my previous English concept. In such a transition, this blog will be a little outside, but I can live with that.
We'll see where I end up with my decision, but I miss the Invision Community and it's a lot that I can do with IC that I feel that WordPress lacks ...

Written by: Jimi Wikman
Category: Personal
July 24, 2019
0 comments
424 views
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Building a new beginning reflection
Building this new site feels amazing, yet very confined at times. Simple things that I have been used to are simply not part of the infrastructure. Other things are just different and things I wished I had a long time ago. Overall this is just the beginning of building a new beginning for my website.
As with my old site I am still a bit all over the place when it comes to what I want the site to be about. I have already started to add my project portfolio and of course this blog, but beyond that I still play around with different things. Downloads are always nice and I have some thoughts on what I would like to do with that. The Gallery is just a dumping ground for images at the moment, pretty much like Facebook used to be. We'll see how much effort I want to put there later, but for now it will just be the way it is.
The forum is a hub for conversation. I have added the "Ask Jimi" function I have been pondering on for a while. I also add sections for community discussions even if I don't know if that will ever pick up. Clubs are there of course as mini-communities. I have them mostly for the Atlassian Usergroup that I am leader for, but we'll see what else we can use it for. Calendar can be used for events, but I am not going to put that much effort into it right now. In the future it can be extended to different types of events to make it more useful.
I do have the commerce part added to this site as well. It can be used for a great deal of things like donations or actually selling physical and digital things. As my book comes along, maybe I'll add it here and maybe it can be used to sell things like art or designs in the future? We'll see what can be done and I have some ideas that are connected to the downloads section. I tossed in a videos section because I love the simplicity and the fact that I can keep track of my own best videos in an easy way.
Pages are the big part of this new site. It's a powerful application that you can use to build pretty much anything you want. The problem is that documentation is very poor and the community is not really active or helpful always. Despite this I find it very satisfying to try to figure out how to get the data I need to build the things I want. This blog is built on Pages, even though I have the blog functionality as an application as well. The reason is that I like the function to add a blog function to the clubs, but I find it lacking for my own blog.
I also use it to build the database for project portfolio. Later I will build some new databases as well such as a code snippets database and a profiles database where I present and promote different people. For now I focus on the basics, but later on I will start looking at database relationship functionality to bring data from other databases into records. This is useful for example to bring in profiles into a project database or reviews into a blogpost.
Over all I need to think about what I want to see here and why. Until I figure that out I will just continue having a good time posting blogposts, uploading videos and making status updates. It's such a nice feeling to have so many functions to play around with!
...but first I will go for a walk in the scorching summer heat and clear my head 🙂

Written by: Jimi Wikman
Category: Personal
July 26, 2019
0 comments
513 views
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