Every journey begins with a first step. Unfortunately that first step is not always made as soon as the journey is ready to begin.
Over the past few days I’ve been starting the preparation for a new life. My family and I are escaping the rat race for a while. I’m working out the notice period on my nine-to-five, my wife is packing up the house and we’re taking a break from the normal life to allow me to focus on growing my tech career - a chance to contribute to open source or blog without the IP clause in my job contract limiting what I can post, a chance to try out a few app ideas and work towards a startup or two (and probably fail along the way), and most of all a chance to not work the norms of a five day week and allow me to work when I am at my best, and fit time in with my family when it is best for them.
Getting Started
As well as mental preparation, at some point you have to break ground. Today I purchased my own domain name, signed up to Ghost to start this blog and decidec to write my first technical post. Today Microsoft announced support for Cordova in Visual Studio. Seeing as I have a few startup ideas that will involve connecting the desktop to mobile, it piqued my interest.
So this evening (after the latest Game of Thrones of course) I decided to do a basic Hello World developed on my Surface and running on an iOS simulator.
This would be my first step on the journey.
But, like all first steps there is the preparation. You can’t take a walk without putting on your shoes. And tonight my laces are taking a long time to tie up. All down to Internet speed. At the moment I am waiting for the tooling to install. It has to do a large download over my slow internet connection, then install everything. All this before I can begin. At this rate I’ll be tucked up in bed with my enthusiasm drowned in bourbon before I’m even asked for the obligatory re-boot.
Currently it’s the Android SDK that is taking the time - which is doubly annoying as I only want to develop for iOS.
Ah well, at least I have time to set up my domain to point to my Ghost hosting and write this post.