So, after almost 2 years at National Museums Scotland, I'm moving on. And not just me, Jenni's coming too (and Oskar, of course).

After delivering a kick-ass, ground-breaking website and implementing some cool shiny stuff, I feel confident I can move on having made a bit of a difference. I initially took the job for two main reasons:

  1. To bring advanced web-awesome to the cultural sector
  2. To prove my technical ability to myself at an international level

I'm happy I've done that. The National Museums Scotland site looks a lot nicer above and below the surface than it did when I and the rest of the web team arrived in 2009. Hopefully the systems and techniques I've put in place will ensure it stays at the front edge of the culture sector in terms of well-considered use of technology. The rest of the web team are still there, of course, and will continue to make cool stuff. I'll be satisfying my urge to build cool cultural stuff by providing the tech behind the various Museum 140 projects.

The second reason is just as important. Working on a large national organisation website made me triple-check everything I wrote but my desire to build ‘Cool Stuff’ meant that I couldn't play it too safe. Favourable reviews from .NET magazine and ReadWriteWeb suggest that we got the balance right.

Personal projects

In the last 12 months, I've also had a fair amount of success with my various personal tech projects – 8bitalpha, harmonious, The Elementals, Whithr, Shelvi.st as well as being a featured case study on phonegap.com. All of which have served to remind me I like the challenge of doing something beyond what I can already do.

Where now, then?

Now is the right time to step up from the top half of the First Division to somewhere in the middle of the Premier League (yeah, that's right, sport analogies). I'm going to be starting in July as Senior CSS Developer at Nokia in Berlin. I'll be working on the desktop interface for the services that used to be ovi.com (until a couple of weeks ago) building interface frameworks and UI components.

Nokia have been going through a bunch of changes recently so I'm excited to be joining them now when there's a great opportunity to make a significant difference on a big scale.

I've only been to Berlin twice (an upcoming blog post will give more details about that) and, despite being German, Jenni's never been so it'll be an interesting move. Berlin does, however, have over 170 museums so if there's anywhere Jenni can perform her particular brand of museum-wizardry, it'll be there. We've asked Oskar's opinion but he's not saying much. He's mostly drooling.

Über-curricular activities

I'm also hoping to give more conference talks and presentations (like ) as well as write more educational articles for this blog and others. I've got a few written that I've not had the chance to present anywhere so I might put them here at some point.

If you have any questions, throw a tweet in my direction.