Stephe's Random Thoughts

It’s now been 20 years since I started building websites and other digital experiences. The one constant over these two decades has been change: technology changes, collaborators change, the market changes, opportunities change.

In this spirit, I have decided to make a personal career change. Today is my last day at the Toronto Star. Next week I will join Kijiji Canada as their Chief Technology Officer.

It’s been an incredible ride over the last two plus years at the Star. I’m very proud of the team’s accomplishments, and have made some lifelong connections here. Things are tough right now in the Newspaper industry, but the Star have a solid digital strategy that will move them into the future successfully.

Kijiji is a fast growing business with huge technology opportunities and challenges and I’m very excited about joining the great team there.

I’ll leave the last words to one of my favourite songwriters.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. One I like to check out from time to time is Rewind from the CBC. Each week Michael Enright reviews the CBC radio archive with a particular theme. I was delighted to here people like Isaac Asimov and Ted Nelson talking about Robots and Computers in the early days of the revolution that has already transformed society and is still in its early days.

Other highlights include the first flat screen TV (from 1970) and a cocktail-making robot.

Check it out in
MP3 format:
http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/rewind_20140123_16037.mp3

or on the
Rewind page
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/current-affairs-information/rewind/.

Juan, Ryan and Erik on Juan’s first day on the job. These guys are the unsung heroes of our Digital Technology group, working around the clock to ensure our cloud-hosted sites and services are running reliably and scaling elastically.

They work (very) closely with our dev and QA folks using agile, devops and other modern work patterns to get stuff done.

Send them a virtual (or real) beer. They deserve it!

I’ve been growing increasingly uncomfortable with uploading all my content (posts, images, videos etc) to Facebook, Twitter and the various other social media titan’s of our age. I do love the ability these sites provide to share my stuff with friends and family, but don’t want them to be my only digital footprints on the record.

I’ve decided to experiment with using my (long neglected) blog to post stuff, and then syndicate out to Twitter and Facebook.

Bear with me, we’ll see how well this works.

Paul Graham is a dynamite idea guy for startups. Here’s his “office hours” from Disrupt.

Photo credit Andrew Warren

So, I spent the last six weeks or so writing Ruby, Javascript, HTML and CSS code – on LocalFoody – and now have to switch hats completely to focus on:

• traffic acquisition
• promotions/pr
• business plan work
• pitching investors
• attending events
• building out the content database
• figuring out how to get my mobile apps built
• attending to accounting stuff

etc, etc etc.

This is the life of a bootstrapping startup. It is never boring, but often overwhelming and whiplash inducing.

If you are an entrepreneur how do you manage it? I would love to hear your tips.

Just gave my personal blog a little facelist. What do you think?