October 2012 - Another Gig Completes

Tuesday, October 30, 2012 12:39 PM

A couple weeks ago I wrapped up my last contract. I mentioned it in Drowning in New Technologies. Again, awesome, awesome contract – I learned a ton and got to work with some really cool people.

What’s Next

The last time I had a break between contracts I started playing with electronics. I've thought about picking that adventure back up, but am hesitant because of a couple roadblocks I had started to run into before. First was cost – tinkering with electronics isn't crazy expensive or anything, but if you wanted to replace every plug in your house with a smart plug for example, it adds up quick. The true low cost solutions are really only present in bulk – massive bulk. The other road block was simply my hesitation to truly devote to something so big. You see, I tend to over-do everything I get into. If I was going to get serious about it, that meant starting a journey of mastering all aspects of electronics – everything from the basic electronics knowledge needed to get a circuit working to learning all I could about physics. Knowing how to do something doesn't cut it for me. I have to know exactly why every piece of the puzzle works. People spend years and sometimes entire careers mastering this. I'm not sure I'm excited enough to devote myself that completely to it. Maybe being a hobbyist is the key here; not working out how to profit from it.

I think I'll stick to software and stick to the aspect of it I know best - enterprise web development. For a while yet, that means continuing to consult. I still hope to create a product of my own though and consulting might be the key to that as well. You see, I've worked out a cobbled together way of managing my gigs, billable hours, invoices, and whatnot. It's a mixture of folder structure, documents, an Outlook calendar for keeping time, Excel templates for the invoices, and a lot of copying/pasting followed by printing to PDF.

I'm pretty sure there are solutions out there for this, but creating my own will do two important things for me. First it will potentially turn some profit if it turns into something others find useful as well. Second it will give me the codebase of a real world application that I can use for both pointing potential consulting clients to and as an example when trying to explain a concept to another developer. It is sometimes rough when someone wants to see some of what I've done or they want to see an example of whatever pattern I'm prattling on about, but everything I've done is internal and proprietary. I'm good at coding on the fly and coming up with sample applications, but nothing speaks truer than code running in production.

So that is my immediate plan. I've upgraded to Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012, and ReSharper 7.0. I've also purchased ASP.NET MVC 4 in Action to make sure I haven't missed anything over the last year. Once I've gone through that, I'll get started on my first product. My intention is code it publicly (GitHub of course) and blog along the way about why I've done this or that in the codebase.

That is, unless I change my mind 12 seconds after clicking publish on this post, or unless another gig comes along much sooner than I expect it to. Wouldn't be so bad if I could manage to write some code in the evenings and weekends. Stupid Warcraft! Yes, I still play - have long since given up raiding, but I do indeed have a level 90 Druid already and have a young panda monk decked out in heirloom gear anxiously awaiting my attention.

Wish me luck!

Tags: work, iroh-services, consulting
Comments (2)
Pitts Pitts 10/31/2012 2:34 PM

Really? Pandas?

rtennys rtennys 10/31/2012 2:51 PM

hehe - ya, I'm hooked that bad. Cool enough back story, but still... pandas