After my dad passed away, I was very fortunate to be able to take some time off and figure out what’s important to me and how I want to move forward with my life. During this period, I moved back to Seattle from San Diego, re-established very close ties to my family, and evaluated what I wanted to do with my time.
Lately, I’ve been getting up to speed on the latest techniques and technologies. For example, I had worked with WordPress before writing backend plugins and hacking things up as needed, but I knew it was important that I learn how to do things the right way using filters and actions. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time learning JavaScript/Ajax, jQuery and CSS. Those technologies really started to blossom when I was getting less hands-on as a COO-type, and I feel like it was very important for me to be up-to-speed on them.
I’m learning to love rapid deployment cycle. I’ve always been an old-school guy, writing code in vi over an SSH session (which I still do of course!). But I like using Komodo to develop code locally, especially with MVC frameworks! I use both SVN and Git to manage projects which allows me to develop on my MacBookPro remotely, my home Windows machine, or the unix command line on my servers sometimes. And especially love using branches to fold updates into my main trunks – truly handy for updating things like WordPress and CodeIgniter.
I’m doing all of these things because I find myself wanting to get back into consulting – it’s what I love and it’s what I’m good at. It took some time away from it for me to realize it, but isn’t that how things always seem to work?
And I’ve got my eye on the startup community here in Seattle. I won’t lie – I absolutely love being around REALLY smartest people. I love the energy and excitment coming from the local startups here, and I’m curious to see where I fit in.
I’m in the process of developing a consulting website, and I’ll certainly be promoting it when it’s presentable.
