For the past ten years, every good opportunity in my career has come through people. Former clients who referred me. Colleagues who remembered a job I did well. Friends of friends who needed help and trusted the recommendation. In Australia especially, the circles in tech are smaller than you think and the degree of separation is tiny.
If you build real connections, you can often sidestep the mess that is interviewing and get hired for the work you actually do, not for how fast you can solve an algorithm on a whiteboard. I am genuinely grateful for that.
I have spent a lot of years writing documentation, first for Aurelia 1 and more recently for Aurelia 2 at docs.aurelia.io. The scale taught me a few things that travel beyond any framework. Good docs are not marketing. Good docs help someone ship. That is the bar I write to.
I built a new thing: Hive Ships. It lives at https://hive-ships.com and it turns the classic Battleship idea into a turn based, competitive game on the Hive blockchain. You place your fleet, you face another player, and the winner earns HIVE. Simple rules, quick rounds, real stakes.
WordPress is underrated. If you only hang out in framework circles you would think it is old, clunky, or not serious enough for modern work. I keep finding the opposite. For many projects it is the most practical path to a high quality site that real people can edit, host and keep running without drama.
I write code for a living, but more and more I feel like my job is designing systems. Some of those systems include code I type. Some include services, models and tools that I orchestrate. The biggest shift is mental: stop thinking in files and start thinking in flows, boundaries, feedback and failure. If you have solid fundamentals, this moment can multiply your impact. If you treat every new tool like magic, it will waste your time and your client’s money.
I like boring technology. Not because I am against progress, but because most projects are not auditions for a conference talk. Clients want results they can afford, host, edit and keep running when I am not around. That means choosing tools for outcomes, not for hype.