As of May 8th, I will no longer work for LifeChurch.tv. I am leaving (on good terms) to get out there and do my own thing. Everyone there has been very supportive of this decision.
This is a scary and exciting time for me. In the short term, I'll be doing freelance work full time. I already have about 3 months of work booked. It was awesome get that much work lined up just days after I officially resigned at LifeChurch.tv.
Most of the stuff I'll be doing is iPhone and web apps. The end goal will be doing Trimonix (my company) full time. I absolutely love creating my own software. Freelance pays the bills and is fun because you get to work with lots of different people and learn new things, but I'd rather make my own stuff.
A lot of people ask me if I'll stay here in Oklahoma. I'm not really sure yet. I might move. Moving somewhere like San Francisco sounds like it would be a good idea because everyone doing cool stuff in the Mac/iPhone/web community is in San Francisco. It is crazy expensive to live there though and I just bought a house here in Oklahoma a few months ago. I haven't really thought all the way through that, so maybe is my answer :)
To all of you Digeratis, you all were awesome to work with. You guys are doing stuff that is measured in millions of changed lives. Amazing.
So if you need an iPhone app, Mac app, or web app, hit me up on my card.
As a freelancer, I get a lot of people pitch me ideas they want me to work on. On average, I get one of these ideas pitched to me every two days. This is great. I am always looking for something to work on.
Almost all of these app ideas are iPhone apps. I welcome iPhone work as I absolutely love the platform. Now that I'm doing iPhone work, I've had clients want to profit share with me instead of paying upfront. They have an idea they probably spent a few hours on and they want me to work on it for weeks and then share all of the profit with me. There are several reasons why I do not do this, ever.
I am fully capable of coming up with my own ideas and then getting all of the money. Why would I work on the customer's idea that I'm less passionate about and get half of the money?
If the customer really believed in their idea, they should take out a business loan and pay me the small amount of money compared to what they will make if their ideas is as good as they think it is.
It is a bad idea for the customer because I will be way less motivated to work on something with future compensation that I may never receive.
So if you are thinking of asking me to work on your idea and cannot pay half upfront (as well as the remainder of course), then do not contact me because I will not work on your idea.
So if you remember, I wrote a blog post about a year ago about life and such. I quit my job and then freelanced for a bit. After doing that for a bit and hating it, I started working at Tasteful Works. It's been a good ride here at Tasteful Works, but August 31 is my last day. Still friends with those guys. Quality dudes.
What I'll Be Doing
I'm already booked for the next 3+ months with a lot of iPad and Rails work. It's for a client or I'd say more. It's a really cool project. After that, I'll be doing looking for some contract projects and work on my own stuff.
I plan to focus more on fun open source projects now that I'm my own. I already have a bunch of stuff started on my GitHub account, but more on that later. It will also be good to have more time for music and life in general.
I've already gotten a few job offers. For now, I plan on sticking with working for myself, but who knows how long that will last. This seems to be a bit of a cycle: keep a job for a year-ish, freelance, new job, freelance, etc. I'm hoping to keep working for myself for a lot longer this time.
What About...
Double Shot - No idea. Tasteful Works owns all of that code. Hopefully it will get released eventually. It's some of my best work.
TWToolkit - Check out my forks: SSToolkit, SSOAuthKit, and SSZipArchive. The Tasteful Works versions will remain, although I won't be working on them anymore.
Countdown Maker - Countdown Maker and Stage Time will remain Tasteful Works products. Kinda hate to see them go, but oh well. Hopefully they will continue to be maintained.