The last 4,5 years I’ve been working as the technical lead in a company that I co-founded; Chef du Web. It’s a digital agency with a strong focus on marketing-communication and WordPress. And after this time, where my responsibilities have constantly shifted between making sure everything works to working on our internal tools, I’m ready to say goodbye to it.

Now what?

I’ll be getting back to freelancing for a while, which was what I was doing before Chef du Web for about 7 years. I’ll be mixing in some client work (about 24 hours a week) along with development of a few personal projects like Alpackit and Plan Ahoy.

I will also keep working on my suite of WordPress plugins entitled Cuisine to make WordPress development more fun. It’s a lot of stuff, but luckily each month will have a different focus.

Why did I quit?

Me and my wife found out about two years ago that our son (at that time 2,5 years old), Nero, had a severe form of autism which was causing a halt-to-full-stop on his development. We’ve learned since then that this isn’t the whole picture; there’s also a chromosome problem (a so called 18q deletion). This news has made it a lot harder to run a company. Basically I need a lot of flexibility in my work hours, just because there’s no one besides me and his mom who can take care of the boy (he’s turning five, getting bigger but still doesn’t talk and needs his diapers changed, for instance). While I found a lot of flexibility in the staff of Chef du Web to put up with me being away so much during regular work hours; it didn’t feel right to sit at home, still helping someone solve a problem while my son was also demanding attention. So this is me -partly- taking a step back in running a full-time business for a while.

Another big factor was that the company was going in a different direction from what I wanted: away from development and towards more marketing communication. This obviously also played a role in this choice; I could’ve seen myself figuring out a backup plan for the care for my son if my company was going in the exact right direction.

Get in touch with me!

I still have most of my week available for client work though, so I’m in no way thinking about kicking back. I’m ready for exciting new WordPress, custom frontend, webapp- or game-development assignments you might have for me, so if you need a skilled developer and designer for your next big project, don’t hesitate to send me a message, or come and find me at WordCamp Europe next week!