Where Have I Been?

October 18, 2013

Yeesh! So where am I behind, and by how much? Let me count the ways…

  • I haven’t put up a blog posting in almost a month
  • I haven’t updated the Yii book in two months (ugh!!!)
  • I haven’t sent out a newsletter in almost three months

But other than that…Oh, I haven’t exercised in four months (in the spring, I had started exercising daily, which I did successfully do for two months). So, where have I been?

Through a confluence of events, I managed to totally bury myself this summer, which I’m just now working my way out of. Since August, I’ve…

  • Given three presentations at Northeast PHP in Boston
  • Continued to work on “The Yii Book” (albeit not nearly enough)
  • Written the second edition of “Effortless E-commerce with PHP and MySQL
  • Started working for Stripe (although only part time thus far, and starting to take on more hours)
  • Been helping with the documentation for version 2 of the Yii framework
  • All the other aspects of work maintenance: answering emails, replying in the forums (with a lot of help from others), doing the accounting, etc.

Clearly, this has been too much. If I had to do it all over again, I would have made some different decisions. Nothing I can do about that now, but I would like to have done better by some of those that I work with and for, most especially readers. Fortunately, the skies are starting to clear…

I’ll be done with the rewrites on the Effortless E-commerce book in a couple of days. That goes to the printer on November 4th, and is out in stores by the end of that month.

As soon as humanly possible, I’m going to put out the next update on “The Yii Book”, which will be a chapter on extending Yii. My new goal is to complete the first edition of the book by the end of November. I don’t know that I can do it, but I’m going to do everything I can to make that happen, if at all possible. After this next update, I’ve got two more chapters in Part 3. Part 4 of the book only has 3 chapters (I think), and those are implementations of Yii, which should be relatively easy.

Then I’ll be in a good position to update the book for Yii 2 (when the time comes), do a print run, and move forward on translations.

At some point, I’m also going to start exercising again (it’s important), and maybe get a bit of rest.

My apologies for the delay on, well, everything. I got sucked into a vacuum of my own making. As of July I stopped saying “Yes” to any new work, which is helping tremendously. I look forward to a 2014 with many fewer projects, no deadlines, and a manageable workload.