2015 Year in Review
It’s only natural for everyone to look back at the last year when a new year is about to start. For the last few years, I’ve had some big changes in my life. I got married, bought a house, and had our wonderful son Zachary born into this world. Given all those changes over the last few years, I expected 2015 in be a quiet one. It wasn’t. I think it’s safe to say it’s been the biggest year yet!
Fairly early on in 2015, around my 31st birthday in April, my wife became pregnant. This meant of course a few things would need to change. First, our 3 bedroom townhouse was going to be a little small for us now. I still need a place to work, and my wife needs a place to play music (not ideal when you are trying to do those two things in the same room). Therefore, with our second child on the way, we started house hunting.
From Legend Boats to Climax Media
Fast forward several months later, and we still hadn’t found a house, but we decided to pick it up again in the fall, when the spring/summer rush was over. That’s when Climax Media came calling. They gave me a chance to further my career by focusing on an array of different products and apps. I had been with Legend Boats for over 4 years, and I had a great time, but I knew if I was going to become a better programmer, I would have to go work with a different set of programmers. So, on August 31st I started working full time for Climax Media, and it’s been a wonderful change so far.
The only problem is, Climax is in Toronto, so I turned my 12 minute car ride to work, into a 2+ hour train ride. It’s not the greatest commute in the world, but at least I get to read, and don’t have to drive. They have also allowed me to work at home a couple of days a week, which is great. With that in mind, back we went into the housing market again.
Yet Another Business - YAB
While working at Climax Media, I met a very smart programmer there named Matt Lantz. Matt is very passionate about programming, and works with PHP and Laravel like me. He also has a great JavaScript knowledge, and is driven to want to create things. We shared many lunches together talking about how we both want to create a bunch of different web services, and sell them for a reasonable cost. We have no desire to build the next “unicorn” or anything. We just want to build stuff, put it out there, and if people like it, they will buy it.
After about a dozen meals out, with ideas bouncing off the walls, we finally decided on a handful of products that we will make. Our business name is a little bit meta, it’s called YAB, which stands for Yet Another Business. I can’t really get too much into the details of the stuff we are making now, but we are working on getting our website live, and sharing lots of stuff with the world.
Emma Blackwell Arrives
On December 18th, 2015 we welcomed our beautiful baby girl, Emma Blackwell, into the world. Everything went smoothly, and Mommy and baby and doing great. I feel that I am so blessed now with a wondering family. Everything I do now, I do for them. I now exist only to be memories for my children. I hope to make them great memories.
I am looking forward to 2016 in so many different ways. I expect that 2016 will be just as large as 2015 was. I really want to blog more often in 2016. Not for any marketing purposes or for “SEO” benefits, but just to clear my thoughts (talk out loud, as it were). As always, I just have to remember to “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”