Check out their website for more.

Where as most young guys dream of owning a Ferrari or Porsche one day, I dream of owning a Land Rover Discovery. I’m not a speed freak, give me a very capable 4×4 with a luxurious interior and I’m sold!

In the spirit of changes and my goal from earlier in the year to stay focused on a few things and get good at them, I’ve decided to blog a bit about some goals I’ve set for myself professionally.

I’ve been a programmer ever since I was a young teenager. It’s something that I love doing and don’t think I will ever stop. However, in my late teens I became very interested in the world of finance and banking. So much so that at one point I considered becoming a banker as my career path. My 6 subjects at school were english, maths, german, business, economics and accounting.

My interest in finance led me to a number of books that I read including “Rich dad, Poor dad”. That book changed my mindset and set me on a whole new path of learning about business, entrepreneurship and investing. I took an internship (actually 3) in the United States and spent my time learning how to build businesses (and programming of course).

I fiddled for a long time in the internet marketing space and tried to build numerous e-businesses. I had limited success and eventually moved on to doing client work and consulting.

Later, I returned to South Africa and took a job as a developer at a startup. I learnt how to build scalable web applications and we built a large advertising network. I’m very grateful for that time in my career and wouldn’t change it if I had to go back. However, I still had a desire deep down to be involved in the financial industry.

That brings me to today. One of the many reasons why I decided to take a job at Tutuka was because it’s in a really exciting industry (prepaid cards). It’s a good match for where I want to be going career wise.

So what this comes down to is that you’ll notice that I am going to start writing a lot more about the financial world. This mostly comes down to the fact that I’m doing a lot more reading and learning in this arena. It’s an interest and passion of mine and I want to share some of my thoughts on the industry and also developing software for it.

Most people find enterprise software boring, but I find it fascinating! I love using an IDE and writing large software applications. So as I read and learn, I am hoping to also write more about developing enterprise software and hopefully relate it to the financial industry thus bridging my two passions, software development and finance.

Here is a picture from the 12 week scan. What do you think, boy or girl?

Megg also did a post with some more pictures. Check it out.

Tutuka is the leading prepaid card and voucher company in South Africa. You will most likely not have ever heard of the company, but will more than likely have used one of their products. Have you ever bought a card based gift voucher for a friend or a gift card from a shopping mall in South Africa? Well then you’ve most likely used a Tutuka product.

Personally, it was a tough choice to leave the full time freelance world and move back in to full time employment. The freelance lifestyle is nice, make your own hours and be your own boss but it definitely comes as a cost. More specifically, I was working crazy hours and had some unreliable clients. Not to mention spending most of my time in meetings and not actually coding. I weighed up the pro’s and con’s and decided at this time of my life, it definitely makes sense to be full time employed.

Another motivation for me to go full time was reading the book called “Quitter” by Jon Acuff. I highly recommend it as one of my top reads so far this year.

So, after interviewing with a few companies and chatting to a number of people, Tutuka was my number 1 choice. It’s a great company, with very interesting code challenges and a good vibe. Not to mention free drinks and an awesome laptop! I was very grateful that I got an offer from them.

On the topic of code challenges, as you most likely know from my blog, I come from a PHP/MySQL background and at Tutuka I am coding in Coldfusion. It’s an interesting language that I have so far just touched the surface of and I am looking forward to using it more in the future. Subsequently, you will be seeing a lot more Coldfusion posts on my blog in the future

All in all, I am very happy so far at Tutuka and I am looking forward to hopefully many happy years working for them.

I realized then, that most of my resolutions are never met. This got me thinking about a reason as to why they are never met. Was it laziness? timing? work? commitment? procrastination? After thinking about it for a while, it was none of that. It came down to one thing, and that is focus.

In most areas of my life, I have always wanted to do too much all at once. Take coding for instance, I have never been able to focus on a core set of technologies that align with my skills and abilities. I always end up falling for the “this language is better than the one I know” fallacy and I go ahead and learn the new language thinking it’s better, only to find that it isn’t better than the first one I knew. Not only that, in most cases the only difference between the two languages is the syntax!

In coding, the minute I divert from a language, I start forgetting it and then ironically enough, I end up focusing on the new language that I have learnt. Why don’t I just pick and focus on one language?

So as I figured this out, I decided that my core New Years resolution is to focus on things and become an expert in them. All the other resolutions fall under this umbrella resolution.

Here are a few examples of my resolutions for this year

• Focus on learning one mobile development language and become an expert at it (incidentally I have picked Android – more on this in another post)
• Focus on doing a manageable amount of modules towards my degree and getting excellent results (rather than doing too many get getting mediocre results)
• Focus on doing one adventurous outdoor activity (more than one can get expensive!)
• Focus on reading one self improvement or business book a month

Those are just a few of my resolutions, but you get the idea – FOCUS! I’ll let you know how I get on through the year.

Walther, you are missed massively! Rest in peace dude.