The Year of the Hustle

2013 has begun and so far its off to a great start; the holidays were fantastic, the kids are happy and Nancy and I have a renewed focus on making ourselves independent. In a nutshell, this year is going to be the year of the hustle. To help kick it off with a bang, my focus is going to be on new sites and projects built with modern tools and cloud-based infrastructure. Yup, if it all works out, 2013 is going to be one wild ride.

Rough plan of attack:

• Restore lost web assets. This includes CurtisRissi.com, BoringGeek.com, The Tomboy and The Geek and Epoxy Labs. Some of you may know that I lost my sites due to my EC2 instance getting hacked by a botnet - and laziness with regard to my own backups. This time around the sites are going to be hosted on an online PaaS - Pagoda Box with Cloudflare acting both as a CDN and a threat management solution.
• Restore my portfolio. I’ve been pretty much out of development for almost two years now as I’ve been working as a PM and Manager during the day. I’m realizing this isn’t my desired career path and that my portfolio has pretty much evaporated in front of my eyes. To help, I’m getting up to speed with some cool projects such as Twitter Bootstrap and Laravel.
• Introduce two simple SaaS applications. I’m going to target online services that have their own app stores, such as Shopify and Big Commerce among others. This is an effort to bring in some extra income to help reduce debt so that I can focus on item number 4.
• Complete one 30x500 style project. For those not familiar with 30x500, you can learn all about it here: Amy Hoy’s 30x500. In a nutshell the concept is producing one useful product or service that you can sell to 500 people for $30 a month. That equates to roughly $180K a year in income. The idea isn’t to get rich, but instead to make a living on your own.
• Get my name back out into the wild. To do this, I plan on speaking, at minimum, at one conference and contributing to at least two open source projects. We’ll see how this goes.

If you have any additional ideas or suggestions, I’d love to hear them. I’ll update this list as new goals materialize.