New year, new theme, new gig

It has been awhile since the last post I made. I used to have the habit down a little better, but there is a good reason I have for breaking it temporarily. August was a crazy month for a few reasons. I got to go to my first WordCamp, which was awesome. Later in the month though, the agency I worked at was purchased by another agency in the area. They interviewed all the old staff. Only some of us made it over there. I was not one of them. So, the great job hunt began…

Hunting

Job hunting is hardly ever fun. Though, I had been feeling pretty stressed recently at my job, so my family and I looked at it as a mixed blessing. Sure I wasn’t employed. However, I was able to take an extended mental break and re-evaluate what I wanted in a job. This is actually something that had already been partially on my mind during my last month or so as well, so I actually felt somewhat prepared to move on to the next phase. I tried numerous places around the Twin Cities, but without too much success. A few interviews and follow-up conversations, but nothing that stuck.

I wanted to stay in WordPress development, so I looked at a few specific spots. I had remembered a talk at the WordCamp that I had attended by 10up’s Pete Nelson about the REST API, and that at the end of his show it said they were looking for good people to join the team. So after looking up the company and doing some research, I figured I would throw my name at them. Here we are a few months later, and I’m part of the team. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to give back and do a talk of my own that will inspire someone else to join up. For now though, it has been a great few months getting to know the team and working on projects with such a talented and professional group.

Oh yeah, new theme

You may have noticed a slight change if you visit the site. We’re in new theme territory now. There is a lot of boring behind the scenes stuff going on like: fully responsive styles, runs build tasks with Gulp (may move to Webpack sometime soon, we’ll see), uses semantic versioning, Git for deployment and version control… yea, lots of new technical stuff. How did I do things the old way? No idea now. OK, I do know, the point is it wasn’t as nice.

I think it fits my sensibilities a lot better than the old one, and should allow for flexible expansion in the future. There is still some polish work that should be done. For now, it is doing its job just fine. I plan on making those improvements in my spare time.

Looking ahead

Right now, I think 2018 is looking good. There are lots of things to be thankful for and excited about. There are new projects to build and things to learn. Hopefully this new theme and new path I’ve taken will both last a long time. I’m going to try to get back on regularly writing here, hopefully sharing some interesting insights and opinions in the new year.