My name is Garry Byrne. I'm a project manager for an extremely successful digital agency based out of Manchester, London and Sydney.
When I'm not doing that, I tend to either be out playing music in various bands I drum for, preparing for some upcoming traveling or out getting smashed :) My house is somewhere I occasionally sleep.
Prior to my current job, I led a PHP development team and looked after all things linuxy at a small media agency in Bury.
I still tinker with PHP every now and again. A couple of my more prominent creations are:
Justincaseidie.com was an idea I came up with around 8 years ago when I first started as a web developer.
It's a simple system that allows you to set up a delayed message to whomever you wish, with the ability to cancel the message before the specified sending time if you so wish.
It's been operational for nearly 18months now, and generated a lot of national and international media interest just before summer 2008. Alas, I ran out of time to properly develop or promote the idea, so whilst it's still working and being used, it's a mere shadow of it's real potential.
There have been many imitators spring up in it's place since launch, so at least it's spurred someone else into action!
This project initially took 8 hours from start to finish to get live and launched, with a few hours since then fixing bugs and testing.
Another idea I had many moons ago as a freshman developer, howcommonismyname.com is actually on it's second interation - the first version launched around 6 years ago and garnered several thousand users before I let the domain registration lapse and lost it to a domain squatter.
Once I finally managed to get the domain back in 2008, I decided to start the system from scratch, borrowing the authentication engine from Justincaseidie.com to enable a very easy user experience.
Again, since launch I've not really done anything with this system, indeed I'm no longer sure of it's usefulness as in the time between first launch and this relaunch, several systems have cropped up that work directly from the electoral registers that are now freely available for most countries. Still...another nice idea, quickly implemented and put online - this one took around 4 hours to do.
This is my latest 'Web 2.0' project, and is based around the inability to 'shout' at people when on the internet.
Put simply, it allows you to enter a message and choose your level of shoutiness, the result of which is a URL that, when viewed, will show your message at a font size appropriate to your chosen level.
It's an extremely simple system to use and I'm hoping it will become quite popular - It's only a couple of clicks from start to finish to use, and no personal details or authentication are required, so there's no barrier for people to pick it up and play with it. it's also extremely fast to load and render due to it's minimalist style and optimised code.
This project is my fastest to date, literally taking 2 hours from start to finish to do. And that's everything - when I sat down to start this project, I had the idea but nothing else...2 hours later, I had the FTP set up, domain name purchase and reported, template chosen, downloaded and modified to my requirements, and the complete coding base in place. I've since spent an additional hour tweaking and tending to copy.