Brilla.org

What to say about 2009. In many ways, it was a year of stabilizing.

Life and Living

I started out jobless and broke, stuck with an expensive penthouse apartment in Belltown. I’d move twice; once to a cheap, lovable frat house in the ‘burbs, and finally to a pleasant, affordable apartment close to work downtown. This also solidified that I would be in Seattle for the long term. It set me free to focus on bigger things than vagabonding.

Work work work

I landed a short contract gig at Microsoft. My boredom and restlessness ran rampant there. Tired of flimsy contracts and drowning in corporate bloat, I got a new job. It’s a small company where I can have a close relationship with the customer, and a big impact on what we do.

And what I do is changing a lot. It began doing cookie-cutter web development work in XSL. But I quickly showed potential and interest in other areas. After mentioning to a colleague that my background is actually in business, I migrated over to Sales. I gave technical demos, and whipped up prototypes for potential customers (most notably, Seattle Public Library whom we just recently signed fist pump hell yes). It went really well, and I liked the aspect of talking to people, but money and sales ain’t everything.

I stumbled into a Training meeting one day, discussing our class offerings. We came up with the idea of offering training workshops to our clients. The idea is to teach something cool for half a day (maybe mobile web design, CSS3/HTML5, jQuery/AJAX, etc.), then use the other half of the day to put that to work on their sites. We loved it. Boss Man loved it. And next week, we are sending out a survey to size up which workshops our customers will be interested in. It might be in house in Seattle, or it might be on the road, but they’re going to have me leading a lot of them. I’ve said from the get-go that I want to be a teacher after I make my millions off the web, so I am super stoked to be dong this.

There’s other things in the works. Boss Man said outright, “Jon, I’ve got big plans for you in 2010.” I’m bout ready to cash in some of that ‘potential’ I’ve been dragging around for years now. Hell yes!

Et Cetera

I love karaoke. I’ve made an awesome group of very cool friends in the process.

I have a lovely girlfriend. I met her almost a year ago outside of one of those ritzy Belltown bars (thank you, overpriced penthouse!).

I am reading a lot a lot a lot. Mostly web related; design, IA, mobile. Some kinky literature thrown in there — I like my Hunter S. and my Palahniuk. Wonderful to be back, at any rate.

Life is generally pretty jolly, and I feel like I am just getting started.

Yayyy

Good things people. I’m like most everyone, looking forward to 2010 with unbridled optimism and enthusiasm! Eat drink be merry, then get back to work :D we’ve got building to do!

The last couple years have been about things cheap, fast, and accessible. Google and Wikipedia cemented themselves as de-facto brain extensions for anyone working on the web. Twitter became the 140 character venue for the A.D.D. blogger. Life hacks, lists of 46 best blanks to do blank. Even a broader sense of advertising: getting ripped in two weeks with one simple rule. Lose weight & get rich fast have been around for a while now, but you see what I’m getting at.

But there’s a new trend we’re seeing here. Lots of brilliant web thinkers (and even celebrities-turned-Twitter allstars) are turning a new leaf. Project52 insists we start blogging again and revive this mostly-dead medium. Guys like Anil, Merlin and Seth are beckoning us to reach a little deeper and put a lot of creative force and focus into what you produce. Derek dissects burnout beautifully. My buddy Jay has kindly asked all the hack get-rich-on-bullshit-content people to leave his internet alone. Rob Goodlatte preaches it. Even Mister Santa Maria’s new manifesto is fucking righteous.

I am thrilled to see a slow shift away from the hyper-multi-tasking life. From spreading ourselves so thin; we’ve done that. I feel like we as a small society of designers, developers and nerds, have proven to ourselves that we can juggle 528 things at once. But also, we’re going to start getting picky and turning away the 524 things we don’t want to do, and start focusing the handful of engaging projects where our passion lies.

THEN. Oh man. Big beautiful nasty things are going to start surfacing. Geeks being geeks for the sake of being geeks, and not just to fulfill a stakeholder’s wish or some bloated business objective, man. The Pictorys, and the Favrds (bless its little heart); the stuff EJS is talking about.

And, as I wrap up this post now, I see Jina writing on a very similar theme.

I have seen the future, people. It is lovely.

Too much going on, gang. I can’t not blog.

Pleasantries first: since we last spoke, I have moved again. This will be fourth time in the last eighteen months, and should be my last for a while. Most notably, it solidifies that I’ll be in Seattle for a while. Good Christ, I love this city.

Learning. I’ve bought some fifteen books in the last two weeks. Design. Novels. Cocktail recipes. Big photo essays. A visual guide to dream interpretations. A few very trendy web-related topics (Ruby on Rails, Django, and mobile design). Follow along, if you want. It’s more fun if you participate too, though.

Work is blowing up right now in a big way. I built the site for Forbes’ #1 Fastest Growing Tech Company. But there’s more coming that I either don’t want to jinx, or can’t blog about yet. Lotta opportunity before me.

Part of me feels like I’m blowing up, too: quite literally, combusting. There is so much ambition, desire, and passion flowing through me. Sometimes I feel like my skin is going to rupture and just spew all of this energy all over the hardwood floor.

Thankfully, I blog instead.