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!