Lately my posts have had a theme of “Focus”. This has been a theme of mine this past year and I’m at a place again where I need to focus on what I’m aiming for even more.

I’m closing Railtie Studio. This is a little anticlimactic as Railtie never got as big or did as well as I had hoped it would. That was completely my fault though. Railtie was an attempt at starting my own business and trying to build something sustainable. However during that experience, I discovered that it’s exactly what I don’t want to do. While I like the idea of being my own boss, I don’t want to run my own business, I have no interest in business development, and I want to do design and development full-time.

With that said, I’m on a search for a new job as a Web Designer/Front-end Developer working with WordPress. I’m specifically looking for a distributed company or a company in the Nashville, TN area. If you know of a business that is looking for someone, please let me know. If you’re a company looking at my profile and wondering if I’m a good fit, please have a look at my Projects.

I’ll continue to take on freelance projects while looking for a new job, so if you need someone with my work experience, please let me know.

I’ve noticed in the past year that I have a bad habit of bookmarking everything I come across when it comes to new web development technologies. In my day-to-day development I stick to mostly the front-end languages and markup but I’ll bookmark just about anything – from backend web app development, to videos of the new tech hotness that I’ll probably never need, to tutorials on an obscure language I’ve never heard of but that I “just might need some day”.

I have a serious bookmark hoarding issue.

The problem with this approach is that I don’t really learn anything completely. Sure, I know the core front-end technologies, but I would know them a lot better if I truly focused on them instead of focusing on what I don’t need.

My new resolution is to learn only technologies that I need for current projects that need them (brilliant, right?). For instance, this blog is getting an overhaul as it is still too bloated for my needs. It’s WordPress-based, but doesn’t nearly utilize all that WordPress has to offer nor does it need all that WordPress has to offer. Utilizing my new resolution of learning only technologies I need, I’m now learning Pico: “A stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS.” made by Gilbert Pellegrom. Pico has no database and the content is all Markdown which is perfect for what I need. I’m going to do a full review once I’m done moving over, but for now I feel a lot more focused by identifying a problem and fixing it. I’m not half-heartedly trying to learn something new I don’t need (and probably will never need), but instead I’m actually doing something.

This past February I saw an ad on Craigslist for a WordPress Developer position. I got in contact with the post author, he checked out my portfolio, and we met up for lunch. We hit it off: I really liked his business ideas, goals, and design-sense, and he asked me to come onboard to build WordPress sites. I am now officially a Web Developer with jlsCreative!

It sounds almost easy, but getting this job was two years in the making. I was one of those people who didn’t quite know what they wanted to do with their life. I knew I liked working with computers though and so I began my dark descent into life as an IT Tech. That was seven years ago.

Two years ago however, I started something new. I started really attempting to learn how to build websites and I got hooked. Now, after a lot of hard work, I’ve finally made it.

This job, and I hesitate to call it a job since I like the work so much, is awesome.

I received a request for a higher resolution version of my simple “Write Code” wallpaper that I made awhile back. So here it is – feel free to download and use if you find it useful. No attribution needed and more custom sizes are available.

Click the image above to download the full resolution version.

The first domain I bought was my previous site: andrewcodes.com. It started life as a static, HTML-and-CSS-only, one page, fixed-width site. And at that time, that first launch was glorious. It ​was very gratifying being able to release something to the Internet that I created. That first site started the ball rolling of my love of web design and creating for the web.​​

This new site is a little different from my first. It’s built responsive from mobile on up, it has a few pages (with more on the way), and it’s built on WordPress.​ ​This is a scratch built theme using a simple WordPress reset.​ It also combines my landing/portfolio page and my blog (which were separated before as a domain and subdomain, respectively)​ into one site. I spent a lot of time on the performance and load time of this version as you can see below:

The end-goal with this version, is to release it properly on GitHub as an open-source theme. It’s not at all ready as I still have more to learn about Git. But this public theme will be a chance to hone my WordPress and GitHub skills and build something that would be useful to other people.