Twenty Thirteen

A new year, a new theme. But not just that, I know I’m using the term year a bit loosely here but since my life sort of resembled a rollercoaster for the last 24 months it only seemed fitting. I see it as a new start, I’m moving forward and 2013 is going to be awesome.

Open source matters

One of the more important decisions I made is that I’ll only work on freelance projects if I’m allowed to publish any code I write for it, that is useful to others, under an open source license. In the past few years I’ve worked, on too many occasions, on projects that would have been very interesting to share with the world yet I wasn’t allowed to. I believe the world of software and web development can be much more interesting if licensing and sharing wasn’t such an issue. I’m passionate about open source and it’s time for me to draw the line.

Moving away from Magento

In my days I’ve done quite a lot of Magento development but I no longer enjoy working with it. It never was the easiest or the most pleasant system to work with, from a developer point of view. But it was in my opinion the only full-fletched open source e-commerce solution. The turning point for me was the acquisition by eBay. In itself that doesn’t mean much, but here we are, almost two years later and the community edition of Magento hasn’t been updated in over 7 months. It has become stagnant, has over 10.000 issues not listed as resolved in its bug tracker and sometimes features randomly seem to break. I can no longer advise the use of Magento to my clients knowing that the open source branch of the project hasn’t shipped code for so long. Plus I feel confident enough to state that WordPress e-commerce has finally matured, clearly underlined by rising star WooCommerce.

Publishing more

Having finally cleared my head I want to focus on publishing more, code as well as articles. I’ll mainly be writing here, but I also hope to pick up writing again for WP Realm. Hopefully one of the first ‘full’ articles to be posted here will be one where I talk about something new I decided to pick up, the teaching of web development to gifted children. It’s has been a great challenge for myself and I’ve had some experiences I think we can all learn from.

Contributing more

Soon I’ll free up some time to re-evaluate some of my existing free plugins and possibly update them. I’ll also start contacting past clients and asking them if I can generalize the work I did for them and release it to the community. But aside from this I want to be even more hands on with WordPress core and I will start contributing more. Early 2011 I started with participating in WordPress trac for at least 10 hours a week, which rapidly declined due to turbulent situations in my personal life, now I’m ready to pick this up again.

I’m going to make sure 2013 is going to be awesome!