This year's theme was all set to be something else, but due to the fact I am currently trying to make it as a freelance web developer, I thought a change in the theme for the year would help my identify my goal for the year. So this year's theme is independence, but it's not just career independence. Let me fill you in.

My way of defining career independence is to be an independent developer. Simple. I want to ultimately pick and choose the work that I want to do in the future. I want to be independent of another company's goals and objectives and work towards my goals.

This is going to be a long term goal, that will require me putting in a lot of hours at the start. I'll be building products, open source applications and libraries and doing a lot of writing.The flip side of this is that I will be hopefully more financially independent. No-one can argue that times are hard for many of us, but I don't want to simply get by month to month working my ass off and doing a dreadful commute to play office politics.

I want to build products that solve problems and generate revenue.With a suite of products on the market, I'm hoping that at least one of these can generate enough revenue that will allow me to be more flexible in the work I do day to day.

It's a dream that many want, but very few take up. I've decided to simply put this out there. Then in a year's time, you can email me and say, "So Matthew, how did the whole independence thing go?". I know what I want the reply to be, but there's a lot of work ahead to get the right reply in place.

Let's see what 2013 brings for being independent.