Wow, it’s been almost a year since I’ve updated my blog. I wish I could say that it was due to me not having anything to say, but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes life decides to shake things up a bit, and that’s exactly what happened to me last May. As a result of this shake-up I was forced to alter my priorities quite a bit so that I could keep a proper life balance. During the next few months I learned an awful lot about previously unknown areas of life, as well as myself.

Every year during the first week of December I look back at my goals for the year and see how I did. I also start looking toward the year ahead and decide on what I’d like to accomplish. What I found this time around was that I hadn’t accomplished anything that I had set out to do during the year. This really bothered me, and at first I wrote it off to the rough year. After thinking about it a bit more though I realized something—I had incorrectly altered my priorities back in May. I had sacrificed a lot of little things that I really enjoyed (blogging, working on side-projects, personal time, etc.) in order to get my life back in balance, instead of just cutting the amount of time I was spending at work. But why?

For the longest time I’ve been a border-line workaholic. It was not uncommon for me to work eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week. In years past though, I did this because I really loved my job, and even though I worked a lot, I was still able to find time for all the other fun things in life. Unfortunately my work situation had changed to where I was no longer having fun, and I was also unable to scale back due to sheer number of responsibilities that I had accumulated over the years. I decided that a change was in order.

After being with this company for almost six years, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about leaving. My fears were soon put to rest though, after my search began. For some reason things really fell perfectly in place and I just knew I had made the right decision. Within a day I had an interview scheduled, and within ten days I had completed two interviews and accepted a position with one of the best companies to work for in Denver. The really beautiful thing was that I was going to be working full-time with Ruby.

So, how has my life improved? Well, for starters I’ve only been working eight hours a day, and I’ve had six free weekends in a row to do whatever I wanted. I’ve taken the last six weeks to decompress and enjoy life more, and now I’m really looking forward to completing all of my goals from last year as well a couple new ones for this year. In the short-term expect a refresh of all of my existing projects as well as a transition of the code bases to GitHub. I’ll also probably move my blog off of my existing setup (which is still hosted on my personal server sitting in my old company’s rack) to something that is hardware independent and better fits my blogging style. I’ve been using Tumblr for the past couple months, and I’m quite liking it.

2008, here I come!