What’s up?
Before I ramble on, a quick note to say I’m taking a break over December. Once I’ve completed active projects I’ll be offline for the most part! That means no emails. I’m not a fan of “out of office” auto responders, so please don’t be offended if you don’t receive a reply until January. At which time I’ll be delighted to discuss new work :)
Silence
Anyway, as you might have noticed this is my first post in a little while. A strict blogging schedule doesn’t inspire me. I’ve always found something interesting to say, at least, until recently. These last few months of silence have broken a five year blogging spree.
I’m tweeting less too… what’s up? When it comes to keeping up to date with the industry I haven’t been making the same efforts I used to. Most of my favourite email newsletters are unjustly getting the “mark as read” sentence. And as for attending events; I’ve been absent for far too many.
But I am freelancing hard! Great projects, great clients. Work to be proud of. Just not much that can be succinctly blogged about. (Or freely talked about, for that matter.) I guess that’s the nature of being a coder for hire.
Reflection
I’ve identified my “problem” as twofold:
Primarily, I’ve realised that I need to focus on web design for smaller businesses. These are projects where I can take the lead and make a real difference.
Projects and new ideas worth writing about.
While I enjoy helping out agencies as a front-end developer — something I’m rather good at — the disconnect with the client isn’t conducive to ideation at my end. By jumping in and out of a project it’s hard to feel ownership of the parts I produce. Realistically though, this type of work is my bread and butter. I very much appreciate these opportunities and will continue taking them next year.
I need to be more pro-active when looking for my own clients. I knew that already, it’s just easy to forget after long runs of coding.
Secondly, my content and “social media” input has stagnated. I used to subscribe to a new RSS feed weekly. I even curated my own. Nowadays, I feel a bit out of the loop. I can’t pinpoint exactly when this changed. Maybe I got lazy. Maybe I got lost when people declared RSS “dead”. What I have noticed this year is that many hot topics within the web industry have been overwhelmingly negative. Perhaps that’s why I’ve taken a step back. I need to refocus on the good things. About time for a new side project too, I think.
On the whole though it’s been a good year. I really can’t complain!
A break
So like I said, once I’ve finished up current work I’ll be taking what’s left of December away from the web. A couple week’s holiday for sure, but also time to plan my freelance career going into the new year.
Have a good one, and see you soon!
