Career (by alaric)
In hindsight, there's two things I'd have done differently in my life.
Firstly, I'd not have created Warhead.org.uk Ltd. I originally set it up so that a group of friends could hire a rack in a colocation centre to host our servers. Somebody had to sign the contract with the colo folks, and I decided that I'd create a limited company for this purpose. Sadly, a few people dropped out, and the rate at which new people came on board was rather sluggish, which meant I ended up paying for capacity in this rack that nobody was using and then paying me for, plus the costs (in time and money) of the administration of a limited company, left me with a financial burden that I couldn't easily shirk. So since the year 2000, I kept having to regularly lend Warhead money to keep it afloat. When I started freelancing, I did it through the company since the company was already there, which did mean that I got to repay myself all of that money before I had to start paying myself properly and thus paying tax on it, but I'd rather not have had to suffer all that long for it!
Secondly, I'd have not gone on reduced pay to keep my former employer going. At the time I did this on the understanding that I'd end up as part of the core team of a growing company once it was through the hard part, but this turned out not to be the case. I wasted several years of slowly rising credit card balances for that (I remember that Sarah and I, during this period, calculated that after food and bills, we each had fifty pounds a month to spend on ourselves).
Mon 16th Apr 2007 10:45 am 
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By @ndy Macolleague, Tue 17th Apr 2007 @ 11:22 pm
Since your previous post re Paul Graham I've been rediscovering his site. I first ran into it when he published his essay on Why Nerds are Unpopular about 3 years ago. Since then he's written a whole load more stuff and I've probably sunk quite a few hours into reading him over the past couple of days. Suffice to say, it reminded me of a few things that I'd learnt at college and filled in a couple of the gaps.
PS: did you get my eMails (over a month ago now) re NS wotsits? I'm not sure if my eMail to you disappeared into a black hole or whether you've just been busy; either way, there's no rush.
By sarah, Wed 18th Apr 2007 @ 4:42 pm
I told you not to worry about me and the house when making this decission - I want to keep the company going but then that doesn't have to be full time.
You need to be happy and we need to pay the bills.