2012 Review
2012 was a big year, packed with travel, new business ventures, new experiences, and challenges along the way. I certainly didn’t stand still long.
In January I gave myself a 30 day challenge to eat healthier. It was tough, but fun being forced to think and do things differently. Making an arbitrary rule and sticking to it can highlight your patterns and break you out of well-worn grooves.
That was good preparation for February, when I would really need discipline. I set up Olio Apps and started working for myself again, splitting time between consulting and product development.
In March, O and I travelled to Hawaii, where we lived and worked remotely for a month. It was awesome to be in the warm sun and skip some of the cold and gray back home.
In April I travelled to Scottsdale Arizona for JSConf, which was full of brilliant people and ideas. Scottsdale was quite pleasant, but super dry. Your skin needs moisturizer in the south west, or you will rapidly turn to dust.
Late April through May we headed out again, this time living and working near the beach in St. Pete, Florida. It was great to spend some decent time with family and friends in the area I grew up, versus the momentary visits I generally have back home for holidays.
June was spent back in Portland, when the weather starts to get consistently nice again and all the fair weather cyclists come out for group rides and Pedalpalooza. I also spent part of the time preparing the two talks I gave at a technical conference.
In July I made up another silly month long challenge for myself, to write on this blog once a day, and run every other day. This time a friend decided to join me and proposed making a bet with actual money on the line if either of us failed. I accepted. We both managed to finish without losing the dough. Committing to blog every day is tough. Some days I’ll admit I had to just pull something out of my ass in order to win the bet. Doing a project or challenge like that is way more fun with a friend. Suddenly you’re accountable, pushing each other, and watching how the other is doing, instead of just talking yourself into it.
August found us white water rafting down the Rogue River and camping among the giant, ancient trees in the Redwood forest of California. So glad I got a chance to see them and hope to get back there again sometime soon.
September took us to Atlanta and the northern reaches of Georgia for my cousin’s wedding. This was the second wedding on my father’s side in the last couple years, and each time it’s like a big family reunion, because everyone lives so spread out now that rarely is everyone in one place. It was awesome to get to see everyone again.
In October, O surprised me with a weekend trip to Florida for my birthday, so we could attend my good friend’s annual haunted house / halloween blowout. It’s been happening nearly every year since I’ve moved to Portland and I finally got to go. It was terrifyingly amazing.
In November, I went to another tech conference, this time in Denver Colorado to attend my forth RubyConf, with my friends at The Clymb. After that I was back for a couple days before we took off to explore Japan and South Korea for 3 weeks.
In December, after all the travel we decided to stay put in Portland and enjoy being home for Christmas and New Years.
Lessons
I successfully got a consulting business off the ground last year. I’ve done this before in ’05-’07 with Electro Interactive, so getting started again was fairly familiar. Once up and running, it was pretty much on autopilot, just finding clients and working diligently. I initially loaded up on client projects, but quickly decided that more than 3-4 is too much to juggle. I need to keep it simple if I expect to launch products in 2013. I’ve whittled it down to two active client projects at any one time. More is possible if full time consulting was the plan, but my end goal is to use consulting to bootstrap a product-focused business, so I’ve tried to hold consulting down to 50% of the time. Lately I’ve been doing more to make up for time off, and I plan to cut it back a bit.
I wanted to do more public speaking last year. I gave two talks at Open Source Bridge, an annual conference held in Portland. One talk was an intro to web development with Clojure, a language I started learning earlier in the year, and the other on building developer platforms, and my experiences while helping to do that at Jive Software. Presentations are hard to quantify in terms of a pay off – it takes a lot of preparation time, and a fair amount of stress, but it’s worth pushing yourself. It was great to have two of my proposals accepted, though in the future, I’ll only give one talk per conference. Better to keep it simple, focus on less things and do them better.
Travel was obviously part of the plan last year, and I think we knocked that one well out of the park. I also visited two new countries this past fall, fulfilling an ongoing goal to explore the rest of the world. Travel reminds you of the open possibilities beyond the microcosm of your everyday life and breaks you out of your routine.
2013
Top of the agenda for this year is launching projects initially started in 2012, both business-wise and creatively. There are a couple product ideas I intend to get launched by Q1. I plan to complete and release atleast one album with one of the musical projects I’m a part of. I plan to write here at a more regular cadence, either monthly or bi-monthly. In 2013 we haven’t made solid plans yet, but we may travel further and for longer stretches of time. The overall goal to simplify and focus more time on less things is paramount.
Happy new year and good luck with your own goals and plans for 2013.
Scott
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