So, 2013 Happened

And not a single update to the site or the git repo for Coldest. "What gives?", you may ask.

Well, 2013 was an...interesting...year for me. Some of it was expected, some not. To start off, I spent the first half of the year recovering from a shoulder surgery. When just using a mouse is difficult or even impossible, game development is not an ideal activity.

That was the planned part. My shoulder had been bad for close to a decade and the time had come to do something about it. Everything went perfectly, and my recovery was right on schedule.

About the time life was getting back to normal, the unexpected excitement happened. On my seventh work anniversary I was informed that I had 30 days to find a new job in the company, and if I was unsuccessful then my services would no longer be needed. I was unsuccessful.

Sounds bad, right? No job, no income, no clue that this was coming sounds like it should add up to a pretty bad time. And for a while, it was. But as it turns out, I have some skills that are in pretty high demand in the software development world, and my previous employer had just made me aware of that about six months before I was laid off. In retrospect, it was an incredible stroke of luck.

Around a year ago I started working on OpenStack as part of a big shift in my job responsibilities. It was a great fit for my interests and experience. I'm obviously a proponent of open source, and I had some experience with Python and Git which was a big help in getting up to speed on the project. Finally I was working on something that made me excited to go to work in the morning. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy coding of any type and I feel like I was doing some good work before being assigned to OpenStack, but OpenStack was the first project that felt right. It was the type of thing I might have chosen to work on in my spare time.

And I did. When my 30 days were up and I was officially unemployed, I continued my contributions to the OpenStack community even though I was no longer being paid for them. Not only was it a welcome break from resume-writing and professional networking, but I also knew there were a lot of companies hiring developers for it.

Long story short, I am now working for a great, fast-growing, open source company, still contributing to OpenStack and still super happy to be doing so. You can probably figure out who if you look around a little bit, but as this is a personal project with no connection to any of my employers, past or present, I'm being intentionally vague so there's no personal-professional confusion.

The preceding wall of text is essentially a verbose way of saying that I've been very busy for quite a while now and that hasn't been conducive to work on Coldest. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get back to it at some point and clean up some of the multitude of areas that need work, but at this point things are still settling down for me so I can't make any promises.

As always if I have any news to report it will be found here.