So I'm going to blog a little about my professional projects. I'll bet there are a lot of people out there who are working in a somewhat analogous situation.
After leaving my last job programming PHP, mySql, javascript, and Smarty/HTML at a medium-sized web firm, I decided to work on my own projects rather than finding a new company. I can't do everything myself, so I would have to use a little savings to pay for some people's contract work, and also start earning revenue to be able to pay teammates.
Conceived a year-and-a-half ago, www.thefitnesstrain.com is my first endeavor.
A fitness site matches well with my lifestyle and goals. My father had a Masters degree in Physical Education and coached me in running and weight lifting for many years. I'm still an athlete, and I ran a 5K race last month and plan more races this summer. I've also been working on a long-term abs program by Kurt Brungardt. I am not a personal trainer, so we'll eventually need some of those around to get enough professional content on the site.
My goal is to create a website that will be useful for both athletes and personal trainers to work together, share workouts, and get connected with other people for motivation and information.
I haven't focused all of my working time on developing the website, and haven't had any other programmers around, so it's still very basic and has some bugs. But, the code that is written is clean, easily expanded, and the foundations to add more features and improve appearance and ease-of-use are in place, and those improvements will happen quickly. The pieces are in place; watch me put the puzzle together.
You might hear my confidence about being able to advance projects. I think one of the biggest resources I'm missing is working with other people. Feedback and group brainstorming are also critical in the early stages of a project, so I will have to make an effort to find those opportunities. I'll carve some time out this week to research professional networking groups and also think about how I can use online resources to find other people to work with.
I'll definitely update this blog on my progress before the end of summer.
How are your projects going?
