The start of the new year seems a suitable time to post an update on life, along with some new years resolutions (if I stick them up here, it’ll give me an excuse not to break them) ;-)
AMBERDMS
The first major piece of news is the status of my startup company Amberdms Ltd, which I’m pleased to say has now been operating as my full time venture for over 15 months!
It’s been a lot of hard work and late nights, with plenty more to go, but totally worth it, with an ever-expanding customer base as well as a growing presence in the open source community as well as Wellington businesses and organisations.
The Amberdms Billing System has been increasing in features and maturing greatly since the original 1.0.0 release in Feb 2009 – we recently launched 1.4.0 which introduced a lot of improvements with packaging and documentation.
The next few months will be exciting with the 1.5.0 release only a couple weeks away and a busy product roadmap.
I’m also pleased to say that not only will Amberdms be a sponsor at the linux.conf.au 2010 conference which is being held in my home town (Wellington, New Zealand) but I will also be speaking at the conference about open source accounting software!
If you’re attending the conference drop me an email so we can catch up, or watch out for me wandering around in a distinctive Amberdms t-shirt during the conference. ;-)
Otherwise anyone in Wellington is welcome to attend the free, public, Open Day Event on Saturday 23rd January and check out the Amberdms booth.
I will post links to videos of the talk once they are released by the conference organisers.
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
I figured it’s a good idea to set some new year’s resolutions:
Make the Amberdms Billing System the #1 open source accounting and billing package in the world.
This won’t be easy, there’s a lot of marketing and product awareness needed which will take a lot of work, however (in my slightly biased opinion ;-) ) the application outperforms any other open source accounting application and I will work hard to make sure it becomes the most popular and trusted solutions available.
The key to being able to take on the established proprietary vendors is growing our developer and community user base, making people aware that there *is* something other than ugly windows-only accounting applications with clunky interfaces.
Move from a vegetarian diet to a vegan diet
I’m still a vegetarian (since late 2007) and I’m slowly taking steps to move to a vegan diet, having already eliminated eggs and dairy milk from my meals – by the end of 2010 I want to be on a fully vegan diet, which is going to require a bit more careful planning on my meals and eating habits.
Some of the reasons behind moving to a vegan diet were in my recent blog post about egg production in NZ.
Try not to get any more addicted to twitter
I love twitter – you can probably tell by my number of posts – however I probably spend a bit to much time on it, so really need to cut down and organise my usage to avoid following too much junk.
And as part of that, I’m planning to increase the amount of blogging rather than posting half a dozen tweets about a particular subject, with the aim of publishing one new blog post each week.
Upgrade this website
Yes, I still haven’t setup an RSS feed for this site. Yes, I’m sorry. Yes, I’ll do it at some stage soon….
