After too long of a hiatus, almost a whole year (and let’s face it, it was pretty sporadic before already). I’ve decided to bring this blog back and try to share a bit more about myself, my business and the technologies I work with. I think putting things out in public is a great exercise in growing as a developer and a business founder.

Going forward, you can expect blog posts related to Laravel, WordPress, running a business and other tech-related topics.

I thought I’d start with sharing what’s been new with me and my business in the last year:

• I left Automattic last June; after four years with this incredible company, and an amazing set of people, I felt it was time for me to experiment with things on my own once again and grow beyond the confines of any single corporation (awesome as that one is).
• I founded Spark Consulting which is a small and nimble software and web development company. We operate as a collective of developers, designers, project managers, and copyrighters. At first, it was just me, and stayed as such over several months, but we’ve grown to a team of ~7 people since then (~ because none of us are technically employees, and we form teams between us on a per-project basis). It’s been challenging and super rewarding to grow the team.
• Our biggest client has been The Image Salon, which is a team of 50+ photo editors who work on professional photographers’ images, saving them a ton of time. It’s also owned and operated by my brother and his wife. Lots of people have reservations about mixing business and family, but it’s been really great to work with my brother on this; and lots of fun to integrate myself and the rest of the team into their company, as we build out a ton of technology tools for them and their clients.
• I’m working with several junior developers, and it’s been a lot of fun to mentor them, teach them and see them grow into better and better developers.
• It seems that the spring is when everyone wants a new website or web application built, after several months of fairly occasional requests, we’re now seeing a large volume of incoming requests, which is great!
• I’m back in Vancouver full time but still enjoying travelling close and far and exploring the beautiful local BC area.
• While I still work with and love WordPress, I’ve gotten way more into Laravel, React and Vue lately, and am really enjoying the workflow with these 3 technologies (we don’t mix React and Vue in the same projects though!).
• I’m experimenting with two different SASS ideas to launch as little side businesses to complement the client work. Excited to share more about that in the future as well.

— That’s it for now, more to come. And if you’d like subscribe to the blog using the menu on the site, or follow me on twitter @jkudish.

PS: it’s kind of fun to return to several tools I helped build for WordPress.com over a year later (Calypso Editor, Sharing, etc.). Some of these are really polished now. Nice work ex-colleagues