Timeout, for now... or is it?

It's about time I focused on myself for a while. We are going through some strange times with all of the COVID stuff, so a lot of people might say "now is maybe not the best time", but I would argue that the best time is when you feel it is right. I have plenty of money saved up, and I have been planning this for a long time. I have a plethora of trello boards with ideas fully sketched out from start to finish, even some with a 5 year plan for business growth. I trust myself to make the right decisions, and I think the right time is when you are prepared.

I was going to just fully quit my job, but my employer offered me the safety net of a 6 month sabbatical. I really appreciated that offer, and I am taking it. I don't know where I will be at the end of the 6 month period, but I have to start somewhere, otherwise I would just keep wondering what would happen if I took some time off and worked on all of the ideas I have been storing up.

I am very excited to be taking more than 2-3 weeks off. I haven't had that much time off since I started walking to the golf course and working as a golf caddy at the ripe age of 12. I started writing html and figuring out what websites were around then as well. I was able to scrounge around for parts and put some working parts together from goodwill computers or from aunts and uncles that had gotten rid of them, so if there's a will, there's a way. I knew from a pretty young age that I wanted to do something with computers, and I was always pretty interested in them. I took my first official programming class in high school which was c++. I thought it was a bit odd that it then switched the next year for AP computer science to be in Java. The teacher was only several chapters ahead of us in his pursuit of learning Java. This was pretty discouraging for me since he did not really disclose that until the end of the course. That class gave me such a negative perception of computer science that I instead decided to major in something different. I majored in Architectural Engineering initially. I enjoyed modeling stuff in AutoCAD and Revit, and I thought that was similar to what I could do with an Architectural Engineering degree, turns out that was a lie. After figuring out that I would likely just be doing structural load calculations my whole life, I decided to go another route. I switched after 1 year into Industrial Engineering since I would be able to apply that to a bunch of different industries and the scope of work from that degree was a lot more broad than the Architectural Engineering degree. I specialized in manufacturing, and had a Six Sigma Methodologies minor (basically just a few extra stat classes). I did enjoy my college experience, and I had a few more manufacturing and business related programming classes. I obviously breezed through those classes, but I always had programming in the back of my mind.

In college I was a founder of innoblue in 2010 as well as ran one of my company ideas through the incubator we created. I worked on Live PSU which was a housing website for finding apartments downtown. I worked with some designers, I built the website with some simple implementations of google maps API and some data scraped from apartment websites and had a working prototype of apartments listed in downtown for rent. The main problem I was trying to solve was that not many of the apartments were listed downtown. I wanted to work with the apartment companies to alleviate the need for students to camp out at certain apartment complexes when they opened their leases for the year. The people leasing the apartments were not really willing to compromise on their side of the business but I definitely learned a lot. I worked with a lot of very smart, amazing people during that time. I was also lucky enough to have some meetings with pretty great resources, such as David Rusenko, the founder and CEO of weebly. This was my first real exposure to the world of entrepreneurship, and that definitely started turning the wheels a little bit.

I did not really have that much financial stability growing up, and definitely not during college or immediately after college. I definitely needed to get a job if I wanted some form of a financial safety net. I am very lucky to have the opportunities that I did, and I am very grateful to everyone who was able to help me along the way to get me to where I am today. Not having a job out of college was not an option for me, I was in debt from student loans, and drove a 99 toyota camry with failing emissions tests and a check engine light being displayed for a multitude of reasons. I had to get a job to make ends meet and pay off the insane interest rates that I had on my student loans, so I was grateful to get a job as a Quality Engineer out of college, testing video device related functionality. Eventually that job would lead me to my current position at the same company where I had 4 direct reports as a Senior Software Engineer. I am very appreciative of everyone who was supportive of me switching to software, I taught myself to program over countless hours, and it definitely paid off in the end.

Over the years while working full time at Alarm.com, I have also worked part time on numerous failed projects that tend to fail because the people working on them decide to stop working on them, and then I end up stuck with some 5-20% partially baked idea that was not really mine to start with. I worked on a website that would consolidate the buy 9 get 1 free cards from restaurants (FatKidWallet). I worked on an app that would potentially match up gym members with a work out partner (WorkoutBuddy). I worked on a website that would sell custom tailored shirts that were made from excess capacity from tailors in Thailand (LeDavin). I worked on a game sales and social gaming platform that would integrate game sales into platforms like twitch and mixer (Mischief).

I would like to have more of my ideas fully implemented, and this is not really something that I have really put my full efforts into. I had always decided to help others out with their ventures instead of rolling my own. Now is time for me to put my full effort into it. I hope you will join me in my adventures and follow along. I would greatly enjoy having some feedback along the way, and any help you might want to give would be greatly appreciated as well.