Excuse the self-indulgent nature of this post, but I think I’ve been quite restrained on this for the last 12 months and hey - it’s Christmas.

At this time of year, two things always happen to me:

1. I get a little bit melancholic. My playlist changes to have lots of big sweeping chords (think ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division, some Band of Horses, some Vaughan Williams). I watch films about people enjoying a simple life such as Harvey or El Perro last night, and think about de-cluttering my own.

2. I start thinking about why I do this for a living all over again.

2007 has been a pretty good year to me. I’ve written about 10,000 lines of commercially deployed code which is a lot. I’ve written several million words in blog posts, e-mails and essays which for me is average. I have about 40 business cards I didn’t have at the start of the year of people I will undoubtedly work with at some point. I’ve also undoubtedly upset, angered or annoyed people unwittingly (sorry!). I’ve almost certainly got things wrong.

Still, now we’re moving to the point where I ask what it is I do, why I do it, and how. Every 12 months I ask the question about whether I want to hire staff, whether I want to go big or stay small. Whether I need to start phoning some of the VCs in that little stack of business cards. Whether I should just go and get a job and not worry about money again for a while.

Getting rid of all the clutter and thinking about what it is I do, I realised whilst reading this article this morning that there is a vision out that there that is so pure in it’s concentrated common sense that at some point this year I once again stopped thinking about doing good stuff quickly and just started doing stuff that paid the bills.

Make it free. Make it simple. Make it open. That was the plan in 2005, so what happened to it?

I read Getting Real when it was first released. I advocate and often use agile methodologies, but there’s something I’m missing. All my projects seem bigger than they need to be. Sounds like I have an agenda for 2008 forming already.

And this is the point. I can make those changes because I don’t work for somebody else. I can take those risks and make those things happen if that’s what I want to do. I can just get on with it.