Life is a funny old thing. When I left working for an employer back at the end of 2015, I never dreamed I would, in the short space of 5 years time, come back to being employed full time again.
Back in June of 2019, I shared the news that I had accepted an increased role at Castos, that of lead developer. Accepting this position meant that I could dedicate more of my time to working with Craig and the rest of the Castos team, and would be spending less time working with various freelance clients at Codeable. The agreement between Craig and I was that of a 75/25 split, I would spend 75% of my time on Castos tasks, and the other 25% working with freelance clients through Codeable.
Now, just over a year (and 8000 plus new sign ups) later, the requirements for that role have grown to a point where it needs someone who can focus 100% of their time to it. So, from 1 October 2020, I am happy to announce that I will be dedicating all of my resources to Castos as Development Lead, overseeing the development efforts for our web application and our suite of WordPress podcasting plugins.
The title itself is arbitrary, it’s the journey ahead that excites me. In the past three years we’ve grown from Craig and myself to an 8 person team working on the Castos Hosting and Analytics platform (with a new developer to be added shortly), as well as being joined by folks from Craig’s other business, PodcastMotor, who manage our new Castos Productions service (About page images pending).
So while I will still be working on building new features for our web application and the WordPress plugins, I’ll also be more involved in finding ways to improve our development processes, scaling our platform to meet the demands of our customers requirements, while helping to make sure our software makes our customers more successful, and also supports each member of our team do to their best work.
In line with this change, I’m also looking forward to spending more time on our WordPress plugins, streamlining them for our WordPress users, and making it simpler to build and manage a successful, self hosted WordPress podcast.
Going forward, the content of this blog is also going to undergo some changes. There will be a shift away from freelance developer focused content, and will be more in line with whatever I am working on, or learning, as I navigate this new path. I’ll probably be overhauling my about page, and a few of the general content pages.
Most importantly, I won’t be taking on any new freelance clients. This means if you are looking for someone to work on your development project, I’ll rather redirect you straight to the Codeable developers page, where you can search for your perfect WordPress expert, and start a project with them.
I consider myself very fortunate to be working with such an amazing team of people, building a product that we all believe in, while supporting open source software at the same time. It’s been an amazing 3 years growing into this position, and I am looking forward to the next 5 years (and beyond).
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