So. A week has gone by with no posting. Lots has happened, but more than anything it's been a time of consolidation of what had been happening in the previous weeks. First, the short version (if you have a couple of minutes, I recommend you read the extended version below): tomorrow is my last day working for clevercactus. And that means I'm looking for the next thing to do. So if you know of anything you think I could be interested in, please let me know.

Now for the extended version.

For the last couple of months (and according to our plan) we have been looking for funding. Sadly, we haven't been able to get it. This hasn't just been a matter of what we were doing or how (although that must be partly a problem) but also a combination of factors: the funding "market" in Europe and more specifically in Ireland (what people put money into, etc), our target market (consumer) and other things. Suffice it to say that we really tried, and, well, clearly it was a possibility that we wouldn't be able to find it.

On top of this, I haven't been quite myself in the last few weeks, maybe even going back to September (and my erratic blogging probably is a measure of that). By then I was quite burned out. Last year was crazy in terms of work, and this one was no different: between January and the end of July I only took two days off work (yes, literally, a couple of Sundays) and the stress plus that obviously got to be too much. I see signs of recovery, but clearly this affected how much I could do in terms of moving the technology forward in recent weeks. Since there's only two of us, and it's only me coding (my partner deals with the business side of things), this wasn't the most appropriate time to have a burnout like that. I screwed up in not pacing myself better. Definitely a lesson learned there.

At this point, the company is running out of its seed funding and we don't have many options left. Even though it's possible that something would happen (e.g., acquisition), what we'll be doing now is to stop full time work on the company, which after all won't be able to pay for our salaries much longer, and look for alternatives since of course we need to, you know, buy food and such things. The service will remain up for the time being, and I'll try to gather my strength to make one last upgrade (long-planned) to the site and the app, if only just for the symmetry of the thing. Plus, you can't just make a service with thousands of users disappear overnight. Or rather, you can, but it wouldn't be a nice thing to do.

Now I have a few weeks before things get tight, and I'll use that time to get in the groove again and hopefully find something new to do that not only will help pay for the bills but is cool as well. Who knows? I might even end up in a different country! As I said at the beginning, if you know of something that I might find interesting, please send it my way. Both email and comments are fine (my email address can be found in my about page).

In the meantime, I'm going to start blogging more. No, really. I have some ideas I want to talk about, and maybe I can get back into shape by coding (or thinking about) something fun and harmless.

Or, as the amended H2G2 reads: Mostly harmless. :)