Happy Holidays and my future plans

I would like to wish you Happy Holidays! I hope you are with family and friends enjoying yourself over the holidays.

I wanted to share with you my plans for the future. Starting in January I am planning on mostly shutting down my consulting business. I have been consulting for about 14 years and consulting has provided me with a great life style but it is time for a change. Before consulting I worked at SAIC, Physical Dynamics, and Angel Studios. I will still provide some consulting services but will limit the time directly helping customers on very small projects.

I plan to spend most of my "work" time writing and developing a few software as a service business ideas.

I have written published books for some great publishers (Springer-Verlag, McGraw-Hill, Morgan Kaufman, APress, Sybex, M&T Press, and J. Wiley) but because I prefer writing on niche subjects (things that are of special interest to me!) I will probably only write free books published as PDFs in the future. I don't really need the income generated by publishing books and I would prefer writing on "smaller topics" that likely would have a small market. My wife Carol is an excellent editor and she will help me as will volunteers who read early versions my books and provide technical feedback.

One book idea that I have been planning is titled "Single Page Web Applications in Clojure" - this is a niche topic that few people will be interested in but I have a personal interest in writing an open source framework and writing a short book around my software will hopefully make the whole project more useful.

I have had a lot of people help me in my working life. So much of what I have accomplished so-far in my life has been made possible by other people mentoring and helping me! When my writing (or open source projects) helps other people I feel like I am paying back all of the people who have helped me.

I plan on making writing my main priority and activity but I also hope to spend a significant amount of time developing some ideas I have for software as a service products. I have always been a polyglot programmer to fit in with whatever languages my employers/customers use: Java, Ruby, Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, Scala, Prolog, C/C++, and Python. I will probably just use Clojure on my own projects, with some Ruby glue code for little utilities. I will write more about this when I have prototype web apps in place for people to try.

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

Comments

  1. Alex Ott8:23 AM

    Happy Holidays Mark!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown12:51 PM

    Sounds very interesting! I've appreciated your excellent consulting help over the years on projects big and small and look forward to see what comes out of your new passion projects. Happy holidays!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown1:32 AM

    All the best with your future endeavours, Mark. You're an inspiration!

    ReplyDelete

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