A new chapter / Ein neues Kapitel

It’s 2am, and I’m sitting in the awesome Airbnb I have whilst I’m staying in Berlin. The past 48 or so hours have been interesting, to say the least.

It has been nice to relax, and take a step back. Over the last eighteen months, a lot has happened in my life. These months I could refer to as my Post-State months.

After I left State in November 2013, I had a crazy few months bouncing between jobs. I worked with some great people, helped build some interesting stuff, but suffered from a massive resurgence in my burn-out and depression, to the point that I ended up in Homerton Hospital at one point.

I knew I had to make changes in my life, I needed to take control of my life again. Once I started coming out of my massive depressive phase, I made some major changes, the first being parting ways with Kano, whom I’d joint as lead of the web team.

After that, I worked at Ziferblat for a month, for free, because I needed something to do. However, working for free doesn’t pay the bills, so I decided to go contract. My first contract wasn’t so great, in fact, we spilt ways after just three days due to a contractual issue (they wanted a company, a company I was not).

However, my second contract was great! I started consulting at GoSmipleTax, and whilst I helped them do some good work, and I learnt some great things about Tax and Business from both @jneves and @cpinto, at the end of May, I finished up with them.

From June to mid July, I worked with Driftrock, who are an amazing company and team. This project is still perhaps the project I’m proudest of to date. The specification was fairly straightforward: build an app to allow advertisers to run ads on Facebook based on the weather.

In just over one month, we built and launched Driftrock Elements. Today it’s been rebranded to Driftrock Triggers, and is like IFTTT for facebook advertising. For that project, it require implementing some complex logic as algorithms, and was my first rails build in over 3 years.

I had a lot of fun working with them, and at the start of July asked if they’d like me on a more permanent basis. Unfortunately, at the time, they were not able to take me up on that. Hopefully one day I’ll get the chance to work with Matt and the rest of the Driftrock team again.

From August until January, I worked with NTS Live, an up and coming radio station based in Dalston, London. NTS are an exciting radio station, their DJs play some of the best music ever (absolutely love a few of their shows, such as Moxie’s Wednesday Club show in partnership with Carhart WIP). However, that contract didn’t work out, come January.

From the very beginning it was plagued with technical issues and mismanagement, compounded by some bad communication at times. For NTS, I was to launch their new website. This turned out to involve building a content management system to manage the close to 7000 recorded episodes of the 200 odd shows they have on the station. Apart from building this CMS, I was also drafted in at times to do critical security fixes to their radio servers, and to assist in the live broadcasts involving Berlin Community Radio, Dimensions Festival, and RBMA Tokyo, amongst others.

It was an exciting project to work on, anyone which I really wanted to see through. However, by January, the contract was killed, and I made a last ditch best effort to finish the project by end of January. Unfortunately this proved to be a challenge far too great for just one person to conquer.

On February 3rd, I joint Motivii as lead backend engineer, as part of my Startup Embed program. Despite being stricken ill for most of February, come April 15th, we successfully launched a private beta. On the sixth of May, I handed over development of the backend to a new team, as I had to step back due to once again having a resurgence in my burn out / depression.

I’m now past that fortnight long dip, and on Tuesday just past, I built and launched KeepIt.cc — a simple way to collect links and rediscover them later.

KeepIt.cc was built to scratch my own itch, an itch I’d had for a while, which proved interesting to work on. The service works almost exclusively via Email, which means using Mandrills inbound webhook API, and some interesting text processing tools.

In the next two weeks, I shall be launching it publicly. It’ll be the first of two startups / services that I’m launching in the next two to three months. On Friday night, I was actually working on another article about the two startups I’m working on, however, that still needs a lot of editing and refinement.

As for the other startup I’m working on, it’s something I’ve been planning for over two years. Something I’m really wanting to see exist in the world. Something I think really has a chance at being big.

However, for now, I’m keeping my lips sealed online. If you’re in either Berlin before Wednesday, and would like to grab coffee, reach out to me on Twitter, or by email.

So, the title of this piece doesn’t just come from the fact that I’m working on two exciting new startups. It doesn’t just come from the fact that I’ve tried to find new directions since leaving State. It comes from the additional fact that come July, I want to move to Berlin.

That’s right, Berlin, you’ve captured my heart and London has lost my soul.

London has been great, I’ve gain a lot of experience, worked on some awesome things, met some amazing and wonderful people, however, it’s come to an end. No longer do I see London, or the UK in general, as being a viable place for business and life.

Today, London is far too expensive, busy, and noisy. I’m at a different place to that which I was four years ago. This is only compounded by the fact that the conservative government was re-elected, who stands directly in opposition with my own political, cultural, and social views. They will likely lead to the destruction of everything that attracted me to London in the first place. And trust me, I turned down some great offers from startups in Silicon Valley to move to London.

However, for me — as an Australian citizen with no other passport — I need work to allow me to move to Germany. As such, I’m available for hire on a 3–4 day per week basis.

If you’d like to work with me, reach out, and let me know. I love design, music and fashion, perhaps you’re a startup in one of those spaces.

Whilst I’m primarily known for my software engineering skills, I also bring a great deal of person experience — ahem, user experience — and startup knowledge to the table.

So, Berlin, who wants to hire me?