Sunset on Moonlighting

After a decade of moonlighting as a Web developer, I’ve decided to hang it up.

Web development, for both fun and profit, has really played quite a part in my life. In 1996 I started tinkering with Web stuff and ultimately published my first in a long line of personal homepages (including this one) for myself and a couple others. After taking a position as System Administrator with an ISP in 1997, opportunities started coming my way for paid Web gigs - and they never really stopped coming.

Over the past ten years I’ve had the privilege of doing work for churches, K-12 schools, colleges, banks, retailers, manufacturers, Internet Service Providers, humanitarian organizations, newspapers, real estate agents, a search engine and others. I’ve built e-commerce systems, Web applications of all shapes and sizes, user interfaces, blogs, marketing websites and more. I’ve been the developer, the designer, the consultant, the project manager - or all of them at the same time. I’ve been a sole proprietor, a partner, a sole proprietor, a partner and a sole proprietor again.

With my life as full as it is, I feel it’s the right time to stop taking on this extra work. This will allow me to spend more time with my family and pursue other interests.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop doing Web stuff altogether. I’ve been thinking about and planning several projects for years, but they have always taken a backseat to work that I do for my clients. I intend to spend some time fleshing out these ideas and taking a good run at them.

This also doesn’t mean that I’ll stop volunteering my services to friends and family, or to organizations that help people. It just means that when ACME, Inc. approaches me and offers me moolah to do some webification, I intend to punt to one of my developer friends.

Maybe down the road I’ll pick this up again. Maybe one day I’ll get some venture capital and really go after it. But for now, I think this will be a good move.