Havoc Inspired

I’ve never had set goals before so this post will be a first. I normally start a new year hoping for the best, expecting the worse and landing somewhere in-between.

Take last year for example. 2009 was a bloody weird year for me. I spent a majority of it stressed, tired and complaining (and for those of you on the receiving end of this I apologies and thank you for your patience).

Highlighting the worst bits of the year I would have to say (in no particular order):

• Not selling my second house
• The cellar on my second house flooding
• The guttering on my second house blocking up, overflowing and causing damp
• My mum being seriously ill – twice!
• My wife writing off her car in an accident that she, my mother-in-law and my son, miraculously walked away from unscathed (well Jack was carried but that’s only because he can’t walk yet…)

Career wise it was a year of ups and downs. I left Leeds College of Art to take up the role of Head of Web Development at a company called Independent Content Services and my first project was a site for ITV, which was quite exciting. ICS had also brought me on-board to help them establish a new web services agency that we named Infinite Path and I blogged about a while back. Unfortunately for me, the new business has experienced more success through online marketing than it has through my particular areas of expertise and so I wish then well for the future but feel it’s time for me to stretch my legs.

But not everything was doom and gloom:

• I officially registered Havoc Inspired as my business
• I relaunched this website
• I wrote my first tutorial for .net magazine
• Boagworld won podcast of the year at the .net Awards
• And most importantly I’ve watched my baby grow into a gorgeous little boy

Baby Jack, 1 year old

Going freelance!

So just before Christmas I handed in my notice at ICS and on January 15th I will officially be self employed. For just over two weeks…

Joining Headscape

From February 1st I will be taking on the role of Product Evangelist at Headscape. I’ll be focusing on the relaunch, development and promotion of GetSignOff.

I’m really excited by this opportunity and the chance to work with the very talented guys at Headscape, and Paul of course (am I still allowed to gibe Mr Boag now that he’ll be my boss? Bah, he’s not my boss yet!).

I'll be joining Headscape in 2010

Oh, and I’ll be working from my home office so it doesn’t get much better than this!

Please start from the beginning…

As I said in a previous post I’ve really enjoyed interviewing industry professionals about their career paths and from your comments and feedback you’ve enjoyed watching them.

I’m going to continue producing the series, however I’m going to start releasing them every two weeks instead of every week. This is mainly due to time, it very time consuming arranging, recording, editing and transcribing a new interview every week and I also have other personal projects that I would like more time to work on. So the series will start back on Monday 11 January with an interview with Andrei Zmievski, formally from Digg and the Lead Developer for PHP6 and the next episode will arrive on the 25 January.

Please start from the beginning... iTunes cover art

I’ve also change hosting for the series. I was previously hosting all the videos on Vimeo, but after Pauls experience with them I thought it best to move as well. Interestingly I appear to have found somewhere even better, blip.tv, which don’t limit how much I can upload and allow me to provide you guys with better quality video download through iTunes so if you’re already subscribed to Please start from the beginning… your feed should be updating shortly. I’m also looking into the possibility of releasing an MP3 version of the series for those of you that have requested it, in the mean time take a look at my post on listening to audio-only for videos on your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Goals for 2010

So here are some goals for 2010.

• Sell my second house. It’s been on the market since 2008, damn recession!
• Buy a new chair for my study. Currently I’m using one of our dining table chairs. Any recommendations?
• Get a new car. Seen as I’m going to be working from home from now on we’re going to stick with one family car this year
• Buy a TimeCapsule or Drobo. I’ve wanted to install a decent backup system for a while, this year will be the year!
• Blog more. (Yaili has inspired me to attempt to blog at least every week with Project52 as a motivator)
• Loose 2 stone. I managed to shed 1 stone last year, I aim to loose another 2!

I think that’s about it. Hopefully I’ll achieve all these things. I’d be interested to hear what plans you guys have for this year? Hope it’s already off to a good start!