Jerry Don

There are happy endings and there are sad endings… but the best ending is one that is the starting of something even better. That, I hope is what my transition from a full time freelance developer to entrepreneur is all about.

Just over a year ago, I posted on this blog that I was becoming a full time Flex freelancer. I had a few clients from different parts of the world at hand, some interesting projects and good confidence in my skills, which I believed were enough to succeed. But then came the recession. My major client called off his project after 80% of the first phase was completed(I don’t blame him – It was a real estate, local & small business project and even if completed, there couldn’t be a worse time to launch something such). Soon, I found myself working on small MP3 players, maintaining and enhancing applications written by bad, unimaginative programmers with even worse coding styles instead of working on cool and creative applications like I had hoped to.

But luckily for me, I got engaged very soon when a friend and old colleague of mine received a large and really interesting Coldfusion project and invited me to join him. Working on the project, and also a couple of it’s spin-offs, spin-offs, I found myself moving from only Flex development to user interface development, AJAX, XHTML, CSS and later on, PHP and mobile development as well. And I loved it all. We began to get more projects that required different technologies and soon found ourselves in need of persons with better or equal grasp of these technologies. But, most importantly, we wanted persons who shared our passion and love for all technology. Persons who, like the both of us, love and live the technologies of tomorrow so much they can deliver it today.

Soon we had our team. And Toobler was born. I am proud to say that in just over a year, the Toobler team has already successfully developed and delivered more than a few web, desktop and mobile applications using a variety of technologies such as Coldfusion, Flex, AIR, PHP, Android etc. In between, we also launched a company website and even revamped it completely once (www.toobler.com) to reflect our growth.

But still, there’s nothing like first love. Being the hard core fan of the Adobe Flash platform that I am, Flex projects are what excite me the most. And It’s always me who works and manages all the Flex projects. And no matter what, I’m always hungry for some good and creative Flex projects.