Gicela Morales has come a long way from lab head at a Mexican
university to creating a gardening Web site
Gicela Morales has had what you could call a varied career,
writes Roisin Woolnough. It began in her home country,
Mexico, where she was head of the electronics laboratory at a
Mexican university for three years, while teaching English at the
same time. Then, five years ago, she married an Englishman and
moved to the UK.
The Internet was still a bit of an unknown quantity then, and no
one really realised quite how big it would get, but Morales had
already decided that it was the field in which she wanted to
work.
She says she found it easy to land her first job and, four years
later, she has certainly jumped around a fair bit - UK program
manager at Expedia UK, Web manager at Prince and Web developer at
The Guardian New Media Lab.
Her latest appointment is as technical executive at Internet
start-up e-garden, which created e-garden.co.uk last year. As the name
suggests, it is a site for gardening fans, and includes
commentary from the well-known (in gardening circles) writers
Graham Rice and Judywhite.
Apparently, the latter has a peculiar claim on the Internet,
"She says the Web must be her destiny, for she had an e-mail
address as a name long before there was e-mail," according to
e-garden's PR machine.
It took a team of six people - a mix of developers and designers
- four weeks to build the site, including one week of testing.
Morales said the only real problems they ran into were the usual
ones to do with stability. "We used Photoshop, Adobe Golive,
Fireworks and Flash for building, and Microsoft development tools
like Visual Interdev and SQL Server for the back-end development,"
she explains. "We had problems with installation and bugs because
sometimes the environment they work on varies a lot, even though
it's all the same software. So you find a bug and put a patch on
it. It's very common."
Another area they have had problems with is their Web server.
"At the moment our site runs on Unix, but we are looking at other
platforms because of scalability issues," says Morales.
Despite all this, www.e-garden.co.uk launched on time and to
budget.
Curriculum vitae
Name: Gicela Morales
Age: 30
Job title: technical executive at e-garden
Qualifications: electronics engineering degree
IT skills: VRML, UBScript, C, HTML, Javascript, SQL, SAP,
AIS
Hobbies: travel, tennis
Favourite film: The Talented Mr Ripley
Favourite pub: Lupo, Soho, London
Morales on Morales: determined, passionate, Mexican
E is for excellence
Have you developed or designed an e-commerce project that
Computer Weekly readers should know about? If so,
e-mail
us.