Realigning the Azimuth

I feel like I’m being a horribly self-indulgent person posting this, but in this case, I’m willing to take an exception. This year has been quite an interesting one for me as a professional (on a number of levels), and with it coming to a close, I feel I need to review how the year has gone – especially in light of my attempts to transition into freelance/indie development.

This is the first part – covering the first half of 2009, mainly to minimise the amount of waffle one would have to go through – it’s already going to be crazy enough as is :)

What made this year special? I guess it was a rather large transitional year for me – I left traditional corporate development to attempt to perform a mix of freelance development as well as putting some more focus on my own projects.

But why? Especially in the midst of the GFC turbulence? It came down to several things. I had recently started with a new employer, working on the last few pieces of a system they were planning to bring into production. Upon starting, I found that I actually had insufficient expertise for the role (the modules I was required to work on required experience which I didn’t have), plus the location required a significant commute.

Over time, those two factors had led to me feeling rather miserable in the role. My development duties, being on features that were beyond my level of experience had resulted in me feeling incredibly stressed out. On top of that, the lengthy commute prevented me from being able to dedicate time to my personal projects – which would have let me blow off some steam and feel somewhat more satisfied.

At this point, the only real option was to consider how I could get my balance back. Going part time might have helped with the personal projects, but it still would have left me working on that aspect of the code.

In the end, I thought very hard, and decided I’d try the freelance route. That way, I could focus on mixtures of client work (which would earn some real money), and then alternate by focusing on my own projects, which, I’d expect to not earn that much back, but give me a lot more satisfaction.

The first things I decided to focus upon were my XNA project Meteor Swarm, which I wanted to complete and release onto Xbox Live Indie Games, plus get my teeth seriously into iPhone application development.

At this stage, I wanted to be able to achieve my goal of shipping a 1.0 of a real-live application. For most of my professional career – all I’ve done is ship various maintenance releases, combined with various projects that were cancelled at various states of development, none of which have helped provide good points for my CV.

The results were mostly good – I was able to put a lot of work finishing up & polishing Meteor Swarm – to the stage where after a long playtest session with friends, it needed a few minor bug fixes before I could release it.

Along the way, I’d slowly been getting to grips with iPhone development via Stanford’s CS193P course, which they graciously put up on iTunes U, for anyone not there to watch. I also decided to fork out the cash, and head over to SF to attend Apple’s WWDC (their developer conference for the uninitiated), as also a further boost to that (as well as a source of inspiration too).

The trip was incredible for me on both a personal level, as well as an inspirational level. Being my first real time out of Australia, it was great to be able to experience another (if not entirely dissimilar) culture. Plus, the conference itself was a great source of inspiration – I quite enjoyed meeting other (semi-famous) developers, and got quite a bit of energy to push with the attempt at the indie stuff when I eventually got back home.

Returning home, my focus was simply on delivering the first release of Eventbook. All in all, that ended up taking another good 1.5 months (which included the time I was sending out test builds to various people).

Overall – what would I say went right for the first part of the year? Besides the obvious, of course. The break I think was necessary, I’d tried my hardest in attempting to make sense of the situation before I decided resigning was the best option – that included trying to introduce some important cultural (speaking of process that is) changes into the organisation.

The break also let me make some serious progress on my personal projects. I found that it was difficult to get into focus in the limited time I had at home each night, once stuff like Dinner & any personal errands were factored into. Of course, that left the weekends – but like anyone, I found I couldn’t sit in front of my machine 24/7 without some contact with other people.

On the flip side, I don’t think I did as well with the preparations. With the knowledge that I indeed wanted to do freelance work, I should really have begun the necessary preparations – items like getting my ABN reactivated, preparing a better portfolio to sell myself, and start letting people know I was after work. Though, the time I did spend on Eventbook would serve to help out in that capacity down the line, so maybe it wasn’t entirely the wrong action to take.