The good news is that that I have come to an agreement with my employers (of six years, I might add) to reduce my working hours to 3 days a week. This leaves 2 more full working days a week which I will be using to work on the Smart-Thinker products and brand. In reality this is more like 4 days considering I work most weekends. From Thursdays to Sundays I will be concentrating on Smart-Thinker.com entirely to meet customer requirements, mature the modules, and continually increase the value and range of Smart-Thinker’s product offering. Please note that this commences in mid September with my first full time day on Smart-Thinker being the 21st of September.
The even better news is that the 3 day week is actually only a temporary situation that suits myself and my employers as I have resigned with a view to work full-time on Smart-Thinker.com effective from December sometime. We are about to release the first phase of a huge migration project from a classic ASP application into .NET 2.0 and they asked me to help out part-time for the next 3 months in my role as a senior developer until the replacement recruits are trained up to a suitable level. This also suits me because as always there are bills and a mortgage to pay and this is my first foray into not working for somebody else so I can ease into it gently.
The ultimate end-result is that from the New Year you should notice a massive increase in development and productivity as I move onto Smart-Thinker full time. This also means that I will be able to action a lot more of the Feature Requests and frequent customizations requests I have to turn down due to realistic limited resources. Thank you for all your support for making this possible. I will be blogging about Upcoming Developments and Module Updates in a separate blog soon so that you know what is planned for the next 4-6 months. There are some exciting new enhancements and new modules on the cards…