Flying solo

On December 10th, I officially started working independently. I keep meaning to get this posted, but the past three weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind with the holidays and a few training sessions mixed in.

To say I’m leaving an excellent job behind is an understatement. The position was flexible. The people I worked with were smart, talented and fun. The people I worked for were flexible and willing to let me experiment with different ideas.

I got to help organize a conference, 4 of them in fact. I got to watch as the conference grew, watch the community that built up around it, and learn from all the people who came to hang out and talk mobile for a few days.

Yet I left. So very clearly I’m slighty insane.

I was getting an itch though to shake things up though. Some incredibly exciting opportunities were coming my way, and I felt I couldn’t pass on them. It was a tough decision, to say the least.

I’m excited though. Excited about some of the projects coming up and excited about some of the things I want to experiment with. I’m starting by consulting and doing some development work on a responsive redesign of a very media-rich site. The site has some interesting performance challenges that I’m looking forward to tackling head-on.

In addition to consulting and/or development work, I plan on focusing more on helping others make sense of all this. That takes many forms.

I’ll be doing some private training for teams to get them armed and raring to go. I’ll be doing some more speaking as well, though I’ll be limiting myself a bit on how many I say yes to. It’s tough—I had to turn away several exciting events in 2012—but with three kids at home I have to make sure they get enough time with Dad (or maybe more accurately, make sure I get enough time with them).

Expect more writing and research as well. There is quite a bit of research and testing I want to do and I’ll certainly be sharing those results as I go along.

If any of this sounds like something you would like to chat about, then let’s definitely talk.

So I guess if I were asked to summarize this entire post into one, very technical sounding, TL;DR version, it would be this: I’m going to make cool stuff and help others make cool stuff too.