Realigning the Azimuth

(This is part two into a bit of a personal retrospective for my 2009. If you’ve not read the first part, check it out here.)

Moving into the second half of the year, I was on quite the buzz from WWDC, and that energy was directed to completing the 1.0 release of Eventbook, and sending it to the bunch of volunteers for its first round of beta testing. I also had I did have my sights on some preliminary bits for the freelancing career… in particular, trying to sort out a proper bit of working space at home – as inspiring as the bedroom programmer aesthetic is, having it as my permanent environment is not a good thing at all.

I also put a good chunk of effort (in the down time between sending off betas and getting feedback) towards completing the last few items on the checklist for Meteor Swarm in order to get a complete build ready for a second playtest night with the gang who helped first time around.

I got Eventbook into Apple’s review queue as July wrapped up, and like the vast majority of developers on the platform, had a fairly smooth time in review. The morning it went live has to be the best moment of the year for me. Getting an actual application published has been a personal goal for a long time – and doing so made a lot of the effort worthwhile.

Along the way I’d announced my availability for freelance work – considering the state of the market, I’d have expected that there would be a lot more interest. Those only resulted in a number of leads, which didn’t eventuate for a number of reasons – distance being the surprising one (at least in the sense it felt like they expected me to work on site).

Not entirely disenchanted, I returned to Eventbook – with an aim to add a chunk of improvements which were sorely missed from the initial release. One of the things which really helped the development process was to reduce the number of people I had testing to a couple of friends who had been helpful with testing the first release.

Along the way I’d also continued with the networking & conference thing – Freeplay on the indie game developer front, as well as both Web Directions South & Edge of the Web from a web technologies standpoint. All of those were exceptionally outstanding on both an exposing-me-to-new-bits standpoint, as well as a catching up with existing people & meeting up with others perspective.

As for what overall went right? First & foremost on my mind would be getting both the 1.0 (in August), and 2.0 (in November) releases of Eventbook out the door without any major issues. Whilst it’s not been a success in terms of downloads, getting it released has been the accomplishment of something I’ve wanted to do since I got out of University & entered the industry: Release an actual 1.0 application. It also served as the basis of a talk I did at the local Cocoaheads group on the MapKit APIs.

The other big positive was simply getting the chance to attend the various conferences: WWDC, Freeplay, Web Directions South & Edge of the Web. In my days as a corporate developer, I would never have had the opportunity to take leave for the majority of these things, so being able to take the time out (even if I had to self fund it) and attend these was a great learning experience as well as being inspirational on a number of levels.

Just as important however, was the networking opportunities. I had the opportunity to meet up with a lot of great people, which in itself has led to a few other bits & pieces – more so for the indie gaming stuff for the moment. Overall, the exposure to many talented people is a great inspiration to continue on your own work regardless!

What about the things that went wrong? I’d say the biggest one has been actually getting projects. Some of the connections I’d made had been with projects which were beyond my present level of experience (at least in some domain specific areas), but it’s also been impacted with my location as well, although that’s been more for projects where I would need to work in hour.

I’ve felt a bit hesitant to take stuff up in some other cases – mainly because I’ve not been confident enough to want to take a project on based on a one-line description. To some extent I guess, it’s down to not wanting to repeat some of the mistakes I’ve had in the last few permanent positions I’ve had. I guess that’s something I need to get over if I’m going to be any real value out there.

The next item I believed didn’t go so well was trying to kick start working out of home. That comes down to a number of things – the first being the fact that I was working out of my bedroom which eventually led to me spending an incredible amount of time in there – both as my resting space, and my working space.

In the long term, I’m convinced this hasn’t been that good for my mental health over the period – working for long periods of time without anyone around does lead to a serious sense of isolation. Even more so when you’re in an outer suburb without many peers close by. I’d also have to say trying to break out really requires the support of one’s immediate family, which hasn’t totally been the case for me.

I’ve been lucky though in that I’ve gotten a lot of support from friends on this one. This type of transition was always going to be rather challenging, but it also requires the support of the people around you, and whilst my family haven’t been so (like with the accepting I need real working space issue), my friends have been so in ways I can’t really be thankful enough of.

Another thing which didn’t go down well was the death of my Windows laptop. With that gone, I simply lost access to a bunch of tooling I needed to continue work on Meteor Swarm (at least at the time), as some of them relied heavily on Windows technologies which didn’t virtualise too well.

Having put a chunk of time into learning the XNA stack, I found that I’d need to find a new alternative. Whilst I wrote some details about that at the time, it happened to impact me pretty heavily. In fact, it wasn’t until I took the RMIT course on Torque Game Builder for the iPhone that I was able to really start to regain some of that game development momentum.

At this stage, I’m now hoping having a working Windows environment (even if virtualised) will give me the boost I need to just get Meteor Swarm onto XBLIG (even if it’s not quite as polished as I wanted), as well as getting a bit closer onto releasing some iPhone games stuff as well.

As for next year? First and foremost is trying a lot harder to actually pick up contract work. There’s been at least one project which has been on the cards for way too long, and I’m looking forward for things to finally align on both ends to get it started.

I’m also really looking forward for some of the gaming stuff I’ve been doing to come together and get that out into public hands as well. Some of things I’ve been prototyping aren’t necessarily original, but I hope that they’re appreciated by the outside world as well.

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.