A Year in Review and the year in Advance
This last year has been huge for me after buying our first home and leaving my full-time job to start my own consulting business. I am going to review some highlights before setting some goals for the new year.
We saw in the new year in Williamsburg, Virginia where Melissa's cousin was getting married. Unfortunately our departure back to Chicago was hampered by typical holiday delays and we ended up being re-routed.
After the physical therapy for my ankle tendonitis, I joined Team in Training in January to train for the San Diego marathon, based on my success the previous year in San Francisco. We trained through the bitter cold with our eyes on June 3rd. The organization raises money for Leukemia and Lymphoma so imagine my surprise when a week after I signed up we discovered my wife's Niece had developed Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma at the age of 3. It made me even more resolved to succeed and I began my fundraising effort to generate $3,900.
I received my Green Card in February after 7 years of immigration turmoil. It was such a relief to finally be able to stay in the country I call home.
In February the Chicago Flickr Meetup Group finally opened the gallery show we had been working on called Digitally Entwined. As the founder of the group I took the lead role in executing Bernie's great idea and 15 of us put together an opening night that drew a croud of over 300 people. The artwork was outstanding and several people were able to sell some work.
I also attended the Frameworks conference in DC in February where I got to spend quite a bit of time with the Webapper guys. Later in the year this resulted in the contract offer that allowed me to leave my job and become an independent consultant. The conference was fantastic and sent me back to Chicago with a head full of ColdSpring and many good things.
I ran a personal best at the Shamrock Shuffle 8k in
March, finishing in 39:03. We've just signed up for the 2008 race so I can try to beat my time. Realistically though after 3 months of 50 hour work weeks with no training I'll be happy to finish.
In April I received an intriguing email from recruiter at
Google and began a 2 month mini-marathon interview process culminating with a
flight to San Francisco, a day of interviews and some waiting. The Googleplex was a fascinating place and
the recruiter Ryan took me for lunch in the acclaimed cafeteria and a couple of
games of pool. I had 4 phone screening
interviews over the period and after the onsite meeting I waited a little over
a week before I finally heard that the company had changed direction and were
no longer hiring for the position. This
came as a bit of a shock and as my wife put it at the time "it felt like
we'd been dumped". We'd put a lot
of eggs in the Google basket and even planned to move out to San Francisco if
it came off so it was a big family decision to do it. After a few weeks of sulking I turned around
and decided that we should make some changes, starting with buying our first
house to put roots down in Chicago and ultimately to plan to resolve my work
situation where I had been frustrated.
June was a big month starting with the completion of the San Diego marathon five hours and forty-nine seconds. It was nearly an hour slower than my San Francisco time and resulted in some more ankle pain. It was great to finish despite the heat and I spent the rest of the month limping around. I gave a presentation to the attendees at Web Content 2007 where my Google Technologies presentation received top marks despite a line-up including Jason Fried and Salim Ismail. Shortly after that conference I flew to DC with three other Duo employees to attend CF United 2007. Another great conference filled with exciting ideas and excellent tutorials even if I did end up being coerced by my co-workers to sit in the dunk tank.
By July my ankle was fully recovered and Melissa and I were training for the Chicago distance classic - a half marathon and my wife's longest race ever. We trained throughout July and into August when finished together in two hours twelve minutes, holding hands as we crossed the finish line. We had an incredibly relaxing week in Cape Cod where Melissa's family had rented a house and I even got to see humpback whales breaching. It was a nice break after all the house hunting we had done and brought us back energized and we found the place we wanted to buy. We signed the contract later in September and moved in September 29th.
A week before we moved I received a call from Nat at Webapper asking if I was available for a contract. After mulling it over and working out if we could afford to do it, I handed in my notice and accepted the 3 month contract, starting one week before we moved house! It has always been my dream to do this but the Google situation, growing frustration at the office and finally having a green card all resulted in the big move. The day after we moved I spoke at CFUnited Express on Amazon S3 and EC2.
During November I spoke twice to the ColdFusion online meetup group about Amazon S3 and EC2, splitting my CFUnited Express presentation to allow me to go into more detail. Later in the month we headed back to Manchester, England for thanksgiving. I know that we don't celebrate thanksgiving in England but my Mum made a turkey and we celebrated anyway, including teaching my Nieces to draw turkeys by tracing the outline of their hands. I met my new Nephew Archie for the first time on this trip and we also made it to Birmingham and Todmorden to meet the new babies that had meant my two good college friends Kirsty and Taanya missed our wedding. Beautiful children all round and I even got a little broody myself!
December flew by as my contract with Webapper came to an end I was accepted to speak at CFUnited for June 2008. We spent the holidays in Boston and came back in time to celebrate New Year's Eve (and our five years of knowing each other anniversary) at a friend's house after some Singstar karaoke.
What is in store for 2008? Some things I already know like the CF United presentation and I have been asked to be a mentor for the early bird Chicago Marathon Team in Training group. We'll be starting later this month and will ramp up slowly over the next nine months to get ready to run the marathon here. I'll know for certain in the next week or so but I'm really excited to be able to help other people raise money and train for their first marathons! My personal goal for the race is to beat my 4:06 personal best but if the weather is as hot as the last Chicago marathon I think I'll just be happy surviving the race!
Now my Webapper contract is over I have been working on some other projects but my goal is to find another short to medium term contract around the three month mark. In the last 3 months I've been working 50 hour weeks between my clients but without the contract I'm down to about 60% utilization in the coming month so if anyone has any projects they need an experienced hand with, let me know! I've been using my spare time to learn Flex to broaden my skills. The Webapper contract I was the CF and DB guy writing the service layer for a Flex front end and it certainly gave me a better appreciation for the potential of Flex. I worked in a vacuum, using test driven development to build CFCUnit tests before coding each method and using those to gauge my success with no interface to refer to initially. This is a practice I want to pursue in the new year and continue to work with Cruise Control for continuous builds and test execution.
We donated all the books we had in storage we had read between Christmas and New Year so my goal for this year is to read the 26 fiction titles that remain. At one every two weeks it will definitely be a challenge but I think I can do it. I just need to finish the last two Harry Potter books first. My last goal is to beat my wife at Singstar. We bought the Singstar 80s game after Christmas and have been addicted ever since. It's essentially Karaoke for your living room but you are scored on your performance based on pitch and timing. I have only managed to beat Melissa at Blondie's Heart of Glass using a falsetto voice so I'm desperate to improve to save my dignity ;-)