Retrospective, and what's ahead

I'm spending a few days in Italy (mostly eating and wasting too much time browsing and reading blogs) for the end of the year, so there's no better time for a retrospective.

Without any doubt 2010 has been the most hectic year of my life. A lot of fun, a lot of learning, and quite a few adventures.

I've been contracting with Vodafone for the first eight months of the year. After accepting a new role in January, I've split my time between London and Dsseldorf, having the chance to enjoy both the life and tech scene in London, and the calmness of Dsseldorf in the weekends. For the first time in my career, my new role didn't involve any coding at all; while I enjoyed the "architect" position, and the opportunity to see and work in different projects, I still missed a more hands-on job.

In February I started talking with a few people about creating an Aardvark for the Enterprise; after many refinements and corrections, Mindquilt was born. You probably know the story since I blogged about it quite a bit. To cut the story short, Mindquilt is still alive and kicking; we have a steady (albeit very small) number of signups every week, and the application is live since a few months now without any issue. From a business point of view it is far from being profitable though.

In the same period, with another group of people, we started thinking about creating a tool to simplify the use of Git in big companies. Being coders, we wrote it from scratch in a few months, starting from March. GitEnteprise was born. Eventually I left the project in June because I really had too many things on my plate; but I'm told that I'm still one of the top committers in the project! I believe GitEnterprise is in private beta now, so have a look if you are interested.

I spent September and October in Austin, Texas, trying to help Mindquilt grow. My experience there was nothing short of amazing. I had the chance to attend the Austin Startup Weekend, to talk with dozens of successful, unsuccessful and aspiring entrepreneurs and, eventually, totally change my view on software development. I met the lean startup movement. I've become obsessed with launching projects (and real rapid development of applications), and done a few experiments to try different tools and techniques.

Unfortunately I've also experienced some problems with US customs, and now my experience in Texas is (at least momentarily) over.

Back in Europe, I've spent most part of November travelling (Dsseldorf, London, Antwerp for Devoxx and Italy) and trying to evaluate the european startup community. I found some signs of life in London startups (at the Opencoffee meeting and at the London Lean Startup meetup); a very interesting and active Italian Facebook group called Italian Startup Scene; but nothing at all in Dusseldorf and in Nordrhein Westfalen. Luckily I'm not the only one surprised and disappointed by this thing, and my friend Omar is trying to do something about that.

December has been, for a change, a very quiet month. I took the opportunity to reorganise my home office in Dsseldorf and to start (seriously) learning Ruby on Rails.

What's ahead

I don't know :) !

I learnt a lot during 2010. I mostly learnt a lot of non-technical skills: creating a startup, pitching products and ideas, applying startup marketing, launching products and trying to sell them. I learnt on the field the basics of startup finance and funding, and I read everything possible about that (yes, even the 1100+ pages VentureHacks book). I'm certainly looking for ways to develop these skills.

In practice, I will spend less time on Mindquilt. Much less.

At the moment I'm evaluating different ideas for new products/services to launch on 2011. Don't expect news any time soon though, I'll take my time.

I'll probably also try to do some contract work during 2011. Shorter contracts, hopefully; ideally something that will help me to grow my new skills (startup marketing? ruby on rails?). Let's see.

Finally, if you are interested in talking about possible collaborations, new projects, consulting gigs or just crazy ideas, drop me a line. That's the right time of the year

Happy new year!