Today is a special day up here in Canada. First, it’s Canada’s birthday. I have a lot of really fond memories of celebrating Canada day in Ottawa. Around 10am in the morning people would start lining up outside the bars, anxious to celebrate the day with a few beers in hand. The parties would go all through the day, and end spectacularly with fireworks on parliament hill in the evening.

Today is also another really special day — today is day 1 of BraveNewCode’s second year, which sort of makes it BraveNewCode’s birthday I guess. Hard to believe Dale and I have been officially “at it” for a year now. Looking back a year ago, Dale had incorporated the company while doing a few small projects, and I was still stuck doing the daily grind in Vancouver. Sometime in the fall I jumped on board, lending a bit of development experience here and there where I could.

By around October, Dale and I were doing quite a bit of business with BraveNewCode, to the point where I really felt like I had two jobs — one was my day job in Vancouver, and one was BraveNewCode, which I typically worked on in the evenings and on weekends. I’ll not lie and say it wasn’t hard sometimes — I remember a few times where I was completely burnt out from lack of sleep, but I knew that Dale and I were working on something pretty amazing.

Around December it finally looked like we had enough work on the horizon such that I could quit my day job in Vancouver and join BraveNewCode full time. January 15th was my last full day of work, and on January 18th I moved back to my home town, a little picturesque farming community about an hour from Vancouver, to work on BraveNewCode full time.

It’s been about five months since then, and things are only looking better. At WordCamp San Francisco, Matt Mullenweg announced three of the top WordPress plugins, two of which were developed here at BraveNewCode — not bad for a company that was only 11 months old! We’re definitely grateful for everyone’s support, and promise a lot of great things still yet to come from BraveNewCode.

So today, while you people in Canada crack a few beers in celebration of Canada (or whatever other festivity of yours warrants a few drinks), Dale and I will probably be tossing a few back in celebration of our first year of business. So happy birthday Canada, and happy birthday BraveNewCode!