Today marks the beginning of a new chapter of my life.
Friday was my last day as an employee of Everyday Health. You did not even know
I was employed there and now I’m gone? You are not alone.
More than 5 years ago, I started what would become a
long-term contract with TechSafari. After working on various projects with
them, I started on consistently work on the Tea Leaves Health contract for
them. In August, Everyday Health acquired Tea Leaves Health. Acquiring
companies generally want acquired workers to be employees instead of
contractors. They feel that this somehow gives them more control over the
domain knowledge. So I became an employee.
Also during the past couple of years, I have been working on
my own projects. Being an employee instead of a contract curtailed a lot that
effort. Now is the time for me to go back to putting my passion into those
projects. I hope that something becomes of them. Devoting full time to them
will help them progress.
Didn’t I do this before? Yes and no. I stopped being a full
time employee twice before. Once there was a plan, but the finances and time
just didn’t work. The second didn’t have a plan, but I ended up being Mr. Mom,
good son-in-law, and parent caregiver. This time around, there are no kids at
home, parents are healthy and not moving, and finances are in line.
I will miss those that I left behind. Our paths will
probably cross in the future, as the IT world may be big, but it is not that
big.
There is a general plan with goals. There are time limits.
This is the time for me to be focused and passionate on what I want. The plan
is not set in stone. First task is to get organized. Accounting, bill paying,
setting up work environment, blogging (this), and further refining the plans
for projects that I can work on. I plan on blogging to keep myself in line. I
probably do not do this every day, but goal is to at least do one a week.
The first project was going to be an integration project,
but that has already been derailed. I usually do not like talking specifics
about projects I am working on. This is for two good reasons: Generally the
ideas are so vague or hard to communicate that I just end up waving hands when
describing them. The second is that plans change and it seems that whenever I
try to give details, those projects tend to fail. But I’ll do a whole blog post
on that project as I think it is important to understand why it failed.
The second project is doing some TLC on Sudoku Pseudo.
Nothing really big: updating the Facebook integration code and perhaps finally
writing the tutorial.
The third project is trying to get some exposure and
feedback for Maze Pseudo. Yes, I have a iOS game released. It happened right
before WWDC and E3 and I haven’t really had time to focus on following that up
more than getting everything setup for it: web site, forums, Facebook page.
This won’t be to involved and is setup for future changes to this project.
The fourth project is what most would consider the first big
project. I have an Apple TV for development purposes. Plan is to integrate Maze
Pseudo with it. This will require supporting controllers for tvOS and iOS. I
also plan on looking at the networking code, as this is the current bottle next
for making the game play faster.
Beyond that there are projects for a cross platform tablet
game, a multi-console game, another Apple TV app, two iOS productivity apps,
and even a couple non-IT projects. I am not planning on doing all of this at
once. I don’t really expect that these will all be done this year. It is
possible that they never get done. The order has not been determined either. I
have also been asked about doing a couple of other projects for/with others.
Right now the focus is to do enough on general planning,
Sudoku Pseudo, and Maze Pseudo, so that I can get to working on the Apple TV
Maze Pseudo project. The other projects are just what could be next.
