Giving Up The Day Job

The In-A-Nutshell Version I have resigned from Ibuildings. I will complete my notice period here in a couple of weeks and then move on to a wide and interesting variety of well-paying freelance assignments covering development, consultancy, writing and speaking. Hopefully.

The slightly longer version really is this. Two and a half years ago, I left a job at a type of company I usually describe as a yet-another-website company, where literally every new project was another CMS website. Which was fun for about the first 4 months and got old pretty quickly. Two and a half years at Ibuildings and I haven’t done yet-another-anything, the projects have been technical, challenging and my colleagues are the best qualified set of people I’ll probably ever work with.

Along the way I’ve also done a wide variety of other things, most of which are achievements beyond my wildest dreams, some within the scope of this job and some on my own time but of course influenced by all that I’ve learned. I’ve delivered training, led projects, been published, become a regular conference speaker and travelled internationally doing so, collaborated on an open source project, edited a developer portal and hosted a major international PHP conference. I’ve even learned to say those things about myself in public without feeling too much of a fraud!

At this point, there are so many things I want to be doing, writing, speaking and so on, as well as some interesting development projects, that holding down my 9-5 as well has become untenable; that’s the main motivation for this change. I don’t intend to take another full time job, although I don’t have a lot of paying work lined up so please bear in mind that I am looking for some ;)

Things I would like to be doing:

  • Working with development teams on skills, tools and process (think teach a man to fish, rather than sell him a fish)
  • API development
  • Technical writing
  • Meeting cool and interesting people and embarking on cool and interesting projects together

Advice on achieving any or all of the above is appreciated – if any of you can also think of me when discussing business, write me a linked in recommendation, or retweet my announcement of my news, that would be fabulous!!

If you’re still reading, then I’ll share a little something with you. I decided that with a career move, I needed a little rebrand, so here is my new angel avatar. I hope you like her :)

Wish me luck in my new (ad)venture, I’ll be keeping everyone up to date as always!