BRETT-REID.COM

Active Ice has been a part of my life for the past 4.5 years. Mike, George and I (equal partners) started Active Ice with the intention of creating a web studio which focussed on quality - in both design and development. Over the years we created some very cool sites and some not so cool (client influenced) but in the whole it was a great experience. I learnt a lot about what to do and what not to do in business and the importance of having the same goal. George left Active Ice in May last year and in October last year I made the decision to leave too. My reasons were plentiful and I won’t bore you with all of them but working 4.5 years non-stop nights and through weekends takes it’s toll.

I had various interviews including ones at Prezence, Sythasite and Stonewall+ but the opportunity to help grow/nurture the development department at Stonewall+ caught my eye - specifically the line “where your role will be to pioneer STONEWALL’s open-source technology”.

Last year was spent wrapping up some projects, all of which were to go live in January. Early January saw the ‘official’ launch of Oak Valley Wine Estate, a project which lasted around 2 months. The site includes my ajax basket system and the client is licensing Seed from us (Article, News, Gallery and Chainbox modules).

Seed is a Content Management System I developed after building custom systems for many different clients over the years. I began looking at Joomla and Drupal this year as reusable tools. Those systems are very impressive but it would take quite a bit of hacking to suit our clients needs, especially if they had some arb request that we were limited by.