Flattery and Trickery… My good friend, Andy, has been working on me for at least a year now to move up to Ottawa. I have visited Ottawa a handful of times now, and it is a beautiful city with a ridiculous number of IT jobs. Jen and I have always said that if I lost my current job we would probably move to Ottawa, as the IT job situation in London (Canada) is pretty weak. Andy’s latest (thinly veiled) attempt to trick me into moving up to Ottawa is to butter me up with compliments. Well, keep up the hard work Andy: it’s going to take more than a blog post to get me to move up to Ottawa. 
Just kidding, I can’t thank Andy enough for the kind words, and for the valuable things I’ve learned from him over the years.
Lessons Learned… When Andy lived in London we used to have “code-jams” where we would go to the bar and drink, play air hockey and occasionally some pool, then head back to his place for an evening of coding. Those were some good times, before I started coding professionally and before I started my current indie development. Back then we worked mostly on game development in C++ and it was tough, rewarding work. None of our projects ever saw the light of day, but we didn’t care. We had big dreams and loved the purity of coding only for yourself. With Andy’s departure to Ottawa more than 2 years ago things changed a bit, not for better or worse. I haven’t done any solid game development since then, although I have done C++ coding off and on to keep my skills up, and I have played around with the Xbox 360’s XNA game development framework. Andy taught me some very important things about software development, and none of the lessons involved an IDE or a compiler. “If you don’t enjoy what you’re coding, then why are you doing it?” This was the motive behind our work back then, and it has stuck with me ever since. I have never worked on an independent project unless I had an interest in it. If you look at all of the applications I have developed and released over the past year you’ll see that they all fill a software gap that I had at the time. I wrote iTunes Sync when I couldn’t find a good, reliable way to sync my cheap MP3 player with iTunes. I wrote Web Performance Monitor when I needed to monitor my hosted web server remotely. DisplayFusion was born out of a thirst for knowledge of the Win32 API, and because I had recently purchased a second monitor and was appalled at the support Windows has for dual monitors. I have enjoyed every single one of my projects, and I have always learned something.
The Future… Who knows what the future holds? Not me, that’s for sure. I’ve got a great job in London right now that offers me lots of freedom and always keeps me up to date with the latest technology and tools. Most of my family and friends live in or around London, so leaving would be hard for both Jen and I, along with the kids. We have tossed around the idea of moving to England, as both of our families are originally from there, but that would be costly and I’m not sure how the kids would take it. So London it is, for now at least.
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