I recently introduced my new venture called Fresh Blocks. A self-owned business of mine for web design and iPhone Apps. I've also recently become interested in documenting an actual process of things. Partly due to both John O'Nolan's monthly business reviews and also Aaron Irizarry's recent videocast series about Making the Transition.

So What Does This All Mean?

For starters, It means that I'm going to be attempting to move all technical related posts (maybe just the future ones) to the Fresh Blocks Blog.

Secondly, I'm going to do monthly and yearly goals for both Fresh Blocks and myself. Of which, I will be using the blog to document my progress, successes and failures similar to John O'Nolan's concept.

I plan on separating content into a few broader categories, such as following my Thoughts and my Learnings. I'll likely keep this page more personal and the Fresh Blocks page more professional.

Hello World

It seems appropriate in a way to start anew. But as we all know, Google never forgets. Some of the things that I am looking to document will be highly related to personal development. Of course, it will also overlap with what Fresh Blocks does, simply because Fresh Blocks is a large part of my development.

I'm going to be going over goals and what was achieved, what was not and why not. I will also go into noting special blog posts from around the web that have in some way contributed to my personal development.

The Year That Was 2009

Last year brought a bunch of changes. In the beginning of the year, I started up a company called Fresh Blocks. It was created to transition my freelance work from my personal name to a more distinguishable brand. The creation of Fresh Blocks also allowed me to learn what it takes to run a business and be a freelancer. I quickly became involved in social media networks such as Twitter and Friendfeed to connect to others in the fields and learn from them.

Another by product of Fresh Blocks was getting into iPhone app development. This of course meant learning a complete new programming language (Objective C) and framework of Cocoa (Touch.) I signed up for a developer's account and began reading through tons of Apple Documentation, Dave Mark's Beginning iPhone SDK Development book, and following along with Stanford's CS193P iTunesU iPhone Programming Course. I also joined various Google Groups, the iPhone Dev SDK forum and Apple's own Beta forum. I quickly developed 2 internal iPhone apps and 1 that was rejected by Apple's App Store due to being a purely self-marketing app. All in all, I learned a great deal and am still thoroughly excited about iPhone programming.

On the web design and development end of things, I got my feet wet with some jQuery, seeing as I haven't done much Javascript since back in 1999, it was quite a breath of fresh air. I also got started with some frameworks such as 960.gs and BlueprintCSS. I started getting down to learning Ruby on Rails and Python. I also introduced myself to Git towards the middle of the year and been working on transitioning from SubVersion over to Git.

And quite possibly, the biggest accomplishment of last year, was my engagement. One that I'm quite proud of and very excited about.

The Books

The following is the list of books that I read as part of my personal development last year.

• The Principles of Successful Freelancing
• Good to Great
• Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur
• Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook (Pioneering Series)
• Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition)
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
• Beginning iPhone SDK Development
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
• Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques
• Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition)
• CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
• iPhone SDK Development (The Pragmatic Programmers)
• Adobe Illustrator CS4 Classroom in a Book
• Free
• Unclutter Your Life in One Week
• The Complete Graphic Designer: A Guide to Understanding Graphics and Visual Communication
• A Designer's Research Manual: Succeed in Design by Knowing Your Clients and What They Really Need

Where I Am Now

I've started my Mobile Programming course at Hawaii Pacific University. The course is centered around Google Android and iPhone OS programming. The class runs until the middle of May. I've also got an iPhone app I've been working on that I plan on finishing up and submitting it for an Apple Design Award. Hopefully winning one as well. I have a Magento project that I'm also working on.

I'm also in the process of re-arranging content and the overall design of this site. Primarily making it easier for future clients and employers to find information about me and at the same time documenting my personal development growth.

What's on Deck for 2010

I currently have the following upcoming for the remainder of the year:

1. Getting deeper into Android Development
2. Starting up on iPad SDK Programming and releasing some Beta apps
3. Finishing up some iPhone apps and getting them published on the App Store
4. Getting back into Ruby on Rails and Python/Google App Engine
5. Learning more about ExpressionEngine 2.0
6. Finishing up a Magento eCommerce site client project

And I'm fairly sure I'll come up with some more goals and such along the way.