I’m, more or less, 2 months late about this recap… but it took me a loooot of time to find some will to finish it… :)
I spent 2012 testing new business opportunities, and the 1st semester of 2013 was spent refining those business model.
The startup business for ideato performed quite well, we helped a good number of startups both with advisoring and code and I became mentor for a couple of them. Sadly DraftQ shuts down, but Oltretata is, still, alive (we also participated to three edition of SMAU, won a prize and we are working on a nice pivot) and we create a new MVP for the Makers market from a Manuel‘s idea. It’s still a growing, and risky, market but I’m really enjoying it.
Sadly even this year I didn’t participate directly in writing code, my (new) work as dad really consumed my nights and I had not enough energy (will and ideas) to be spent on something different. Moreover I dedicated my ideato time, maybe too much of that, building new business opportunities and having meeting with wannabe investors, wannabe startuppers and wannabe wannabers.
As for 2012 I participated in writing a technical cookbook for FAG Edizioni, this time it’s an italian guide to Javascript’s best practices where I curated the authors coordination and I wrote a chapter on html5 storage features. You can find a free chapter (in italian) here.
PHP Best Practices is still performing well, thanks.. and continue to buy it… ;)
2013 is definitely my conferences year. With some folks I created from scratch the 1st conference of (web)typography in Italy and it was a success. We will replicate it for sure in 2014!
JsDay and phpDay are still growing. We sold more than 500 tickets and we had more than 350 attendees for each of the 4 days of the conference. Sadly this year we didn’t have any huge name but I got a lot of pinky promises for 2014’s editions… ;)
With the GrUSP I also organised and managed a lot of one-day-conferences: SymfonyDay, ZendFrameworkDay, MagentoDay, wpDay, the 3rd edition of phpToStart and the next nosqlDay.
At last but not least I’m taking part in the steering committee of Zend Conference in Paris and BetterSoftware in Florence, where I’m contributing also in the new ideas for the evolution of the conference.
I did a lot of things but I’m still not completely satisfied by my job. Last year I promised myself to work for a couple of new foreign customers and still I’m struggling to convince them that ideato is a good partner. If you have some ideas about that, must not involve calling completely unknown companies on skype asking them “can I work with you?” (I’m not interested in being a sub contractor) or open a new company somewhere else, please share them with me.
For the moment I’ll spent the rest of the year trying to expand the ideato’s cowo in Cesena, and maybe, building a new one in Bologna.
Btw be a dad is a great job :)