Last week was my last official week at Telefonica (02). I had spent nearly exactly four years in their innovation department. So why move on now?
We all know the last year has been hard and even with all the treatment and with all my moving forward I still need a bigger break, a bigger change. Not working full time for a company for a while will help with this. The past few months have been seeing me feel a lot better, however I have some savings and am taking some time for a self imposed sabbatical.
I won’t just be milling around though, I have speaking engagements booked up all the way until December! Which is amazing and also gives me the chance to do some travelling which has been on my bucket list for an extremely long time, always put on the back burner for career and work. Time to take a bit of a breather from the 9 to 5 take some time for some exploration!
Another reason to move on was the work wasn’t as challenging or web focussed as it had been at the beginning. Web technologies have progressed so much in the past four years and I have been so privileged to have the time to research and play with all the new ones, but the focus of the team had slowly begun to change and this wasn’t the objective anymore.
It is still mine however, and on top of this realising the course of my own career is important and having some space to do that at this point is needed. It’s been nearly 15 years, this is a long time. Before I got sick I was considering leaving the industry altogether due to a variety of different reasons, (something I shall write about when I have the strength), but this past year reignited my passion and there’s so many things I want to learn and even more things I want to build. I’m hoping this will give me the time.
I will be available for consultancy, speaking, writing and dev/design work (although the next few months are already getting busy!). My first project? Well I have two, because working on one thing at a time is sensible: "A digital snowflake (more about this later) and my portfolio of course - keep a look out, I started the build today 😄