The Year of 2009

It’s been quite a turbulent year this year. Kicking it off it began with a temperature of -35 on New Years day, lots of cleaning up from the celebrations the night before but more holiday fun ahead in Canada. Travelled through Western Canada with my awesome Canadian partner and got to see college life first hand.

After leaving Canada it was time to set up some projects and learning. Having programmed in PHP for a few years, at a hobbyist level it was time to step it up and bite the bullet and jump into the long avoided frameworks. A quick touch back to Django had me scratching my head again at the challenge of learning a new language alongside a framework methodology I had no idea about.

A friend of mine from Germany recommend that I take a decent look at the CakePHP framework and after getting my head around why I would abstract my functions out into an MVC structure I got going on building up the projects that I had started by nowhere near completed.

My podcast hosting project got off to a decent start, blazesyn.com, but then hit some big walls, of which I plan to get around in the new year. This got my CakePHP and PHP skills up to much stronger level. My partner, after killing her University degree came down to Australia to live, landing in May. We took some time out, and travelled around Brisbane and down to Melbourne, enjoying the time together to make up for time lost. However the holidays slowly ran down as the bank dried up.

In the mean time I stumbled on an idea while on Holidays, an idea that I had roughly three years ago, but the plans fell through due to costs. It was a decal/signage business purely online. Luckily I had built up my CakePHP skills and got straight to work on wedecal.com which has been going strong. We’ve invested a decent amount of money into advertising and we’re seeing the return slowly climb as the repeat business kicks into effect.

Then I got lucky, I received two expressions of interest for full time work through this blog at jotlab.com. One position was working remotely for a fashion website in Sydney. That fell through, poor communication, which is something you simply can’t have when working remotely. I pulled the pin on that one, but as soon as I did a new opportunity opened up. A local advertising agency contacted me, again through this blog, saying they’ve been following my topics on CakePHP and they would like to offer me a full time position as a CakePHP developer in Brisbane.

I jumped at the opportunity. The workplace was a pad, it had a BBQ area, a swimming pool and the whole place was a decked out church! What’s more they put on a free lunch and beer every Friday afternoon, that’s my kind of work environment. The profile of the clients was jaw dropping and the projects were always challenging. I was on a three week trial then the work ran out. I was back to looking for work.

It was job time and I was sending out resumes to pretty much any web development or web related job I could find. The replies came in, recruiters were calling, positions were opening up and everyone was interested, but not on the terms I wanted. Then I got a phone call from the church of CakePHP, they wanted me back, this time it was I writing for a full time position, and that’s where I am now.

As for development, I am aiming to getting a bit deeper into the CakePHP core. Understanding the inner workings and what seems to be a large array of undocumented CakePHP functions. Besides that I really want to get into Ruby on Rails. It was a bit unnerving to see the CakePHP team split as a core dev moved to create his own branch/framework based on CakePHP3. If i do get extra time it’s onto iPhone development, however one step at a time.

And that is my year of 2009, in terms of development, work and travel. As for next year, our concentration is on moving closer to our workplaces and visa’s. Let’s hope Australia deals us an okay hand for 2010.