It’s now time for my list of professional and career focused things I’d like to tackle in 2012. This is going to be edge of your seat exciting for most of you so I’ll understand if you need to take a few minutes to catch your breath after each of these items:

• Set Fore Score free. Several years ago I wrote a web application for tracking and monitoring your personal golf performances. Since that time I’ve let it slide to the wayside as more important things, like projects that pay the bills, came along. This year I’d like to either sell off the site entirely or swap it from a limited demo/upgrade system to a free for everyone application.
• Use Amazon Web Services more. I have a lot of programs and processes that would be much better served running in the poorly named “cloud” than on the servers they currently live on. Plus, I’ve always wanted to learn how to use things like EC2 and S3 but never got around to it. [Spoiler Alert: I actually started using EC2 before this post was published and things are going well.]
• More iOS Apps. I’m going to try and get back into iOS programming this year. I would like to release two or three unique apps instead of cheating like I did in 2012 and releasing multiple apps based on the same codebase. It was clear I needed to learn more about Objective-C and iOS programming so I’m working through some books and tutorials to get up to speed (I posted a review of one such book earlier this month).
• Less client work. After eight years, both full and part-time, in the client services business I might be starting to get worn out a bit. Freelancing isn’t the best long-term career solution even when disregarding the fatigue factor. It’s difficult at times to be so reliant on a client base that can dump you at any given moment. I’d like to create more revenue opportunities outside of freelance client work in 2012 to help provide more financial stability.