Retrospective: 2016-2019

'The Park' by Zoe Michalik, age 4 (2016)

2016 was a pivotal year for me. We were expecting our second child - Isaiah - and I was still in the process of finishing up as a business partner at Rocketmen, a company I co-founded with my friend.

Stepping away from Rocketmen

Business had been going very well for us at Rocketmen in the last few years, but, ultimately, I made the decision to step away so that I could focus on family and scale back work. The plan was to take some time off and then slowly get back into consulting or freelancing to pay the bills.

I'll always be grateful to Vincent, my business partner and friend, for the time at Rocketmen. He is without doubt, one of the most talented developers and pragmatic people I have ever met, I learned a lot from him along the way on not just programming, but communication.

Back to freelance and consulting

Around the time of my sons birth, a friend and ex-colleague from the ElevenMedia days, Aaron Rutley, put me in touch with a couple of agencies that he had been doing some consulting work with.

A lot of the time it's not what you know, but who you know. I've found this to be true in pretty much the majority of my career in digital. Sure, people would not recommend or connect with you if your work was a bit shite, so what you know is also important, but I don't think I ever really had to shill my services or cold call people at any point in my career.

The agencies Aaron put me in touch with were Creative Approach and Digital Thing, and I ended up working with both for the majority of 2016-2019 as I stepped away from Rocketmen and transitioned to working from home again part time.

I would sum the work in this period as many consisting of projects around:

• API integration and development
• Custom plugins and modules for existing projects
• More 'high end' or complex problem solving in the WordPress/WooCommerce PHP ecosystem

This all helped in the lead up to 2019 where I worked on a pilot product for Envato in React and another where I built a custom middleware that automated workflows between 3rd party SaaS products using a custom PHP framework.

Miscellaneous stuff

I got into building custom mechanical keyboards more in 2016 and ended up soldering and programming a couple of boards.

You can see a couple of these here:

• S60-X Build
• PS2AVR Build

On top of this I ended up trying out a stack of different boards like the Whitefox and HHKB.

Ironically, later in 2017 I read 'Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism' by Fumio Sasaki and went down the minimalism rabbit like many other Marie Kondo wannabes at the time.

This meant selling off most of the custom boards I made on r/mechmarket along with a bunch of old music gear from my days of playing local bands.

Summary

Dealing with a newborn plus a 4 year old was a challenge and I'm glad I took the step back from running a business.

The slow return to freelance work allowed me to take on challenging projects at my own pace and still continue to learn and grow. It all felt like a steady progression from the work I had been doing before, and this time around I was freelancing and working on many projects simultaneously - as opposed to the 2010-2013 era where I was mostly freelancing on site for ad agencies one at a time.

Ultimately, it all lead up to the life changing move to Singapore in December 2019 and a step away from web development for maybe a chance at something new.

I'll be posting a retro of our time in Singapore (so far) at some point soon.