Perspectives: Moving On to Greener Pastures, with Perks.

It is amazing how quickly situations and environments change.  One moment I’m in what I consider a bait-and-switch job, and the next I find I’m getting calls and offers from every direction.  As is par for the course, only a small percentage of the positions availed and/or offered to me were of true interest to me at this point in my career.  I’m appreciative for the opportunities availed by those companies, individuals and startups with whom I’ve spoken to and/or met personally in the past two months, and I wanted to state that for the record, but that brings me to the present.

My new position as Chief Software Architect for several companies belonging to a successful  entrepreneur.  This is not a new experience for me, but I have to say that the flexibility included with this new position provides me a certain level of freedom sorely missing from the anomaly that was my previous position.  I wholeheartedly look forward to this new venture and know for sure that two days from now (as of this writing), when I am on my way to New York to meet up with one of the firms for which I will be helping to reshape technology-wise, that I made the right decision.

I will miss interacting with my soon to be former co-workers, though I won’t miss the rest of the environment there, which ironically was one of the original reasons for choosing the position in the first place.   Conversely, just as I have things that I will miss with my soon to be former position, I have much to look forward to with my newer role and corporate overlord.  Either way, I have much for which to prepare and at this point I’m already planning the establishment of the core tech upon which to base the new infrastructure.  I’m thinking Postgesql, Python, Java and OpenSUSE on a Core 2 Duo platform, and in a later entry, I’ll be discussing which of the aforementioned technologies upon which I decided, but until then..  

Future Aspirations.

I recently had dinner with a previous pseudo-co-worker from my previous contract to catch up on things since parting ways.  I say "pseudo-co-worker" because ultimately when one is a contractor, he/she has no co-workers with only the exception of other contractors on the same project for which they were contracted.  He works for a software production firm primarily in Java, and that little tidbit of information started me thinking.  What I have wanted for all of these years in the profession was to work for a software house.  

I know that some of the open source crowd are going to say "why not contribute to new and/or existing open source project?" to which I simply point out that is isn't the same.  I have written and distributed code under both the artistic license as well as the BSD license, but ultimately it isn't solely about the code, it is about the environment.  Right now, I work in an environment in which there is really one person with whom I can speak and joke regarding code and geekdom in general, and I enjoy that.  I do know however, that much like my previous work associate, I want the whole environment, surrounded by other coders of varying capabilities and disciplines.  

I'm sure some might imply that I have a sort of fantasy view of these environments, but I beg to differ based upon the opinions of others that I know personally.  There is a certain camaraderie in highly skilled engineering/creative homogeneous work place environments which just isn't found elsewhere.  If anyone reading this has ever had the opportunity to read any blogs from the original coding group at Netscape or Apple, you'll know full well as to what I'm referring.

I know full well that there are high stress time periods at those companies and that more so those environments are more conducive to non-family-life encumbered employees, but there are definitely exceptions as such.  

Either way, back to my friend.  I think he pointed out something to me that I feel would me help with my, dare I say, professional environmental depression, that being -- attending programming/tech conferences.  Back in 2000, I attended Linux World in New York at the Jacob Javits Center, and then again in 2001.  It was a blast, by and far.  I do have to say that 2000 was a much better event than 2001 not only because of the IBM sponsored rave, BattleBots, and free (as-in "beer") bar, but because of the people there.  It seemed to go quite a bit more corporate in one single year.  I met many interesting people during those conventions, and even received several job offerings as well, though I didn't take any, as much as I should've since a few were at software houses.   Either way, I've lost my focus of this post, but I can say that I've made it a personal resolution to start heading to more developer related cons, now the questions are, which ones?  PyCon?  JavaOne?  LUG Radio Live (US or UK)?   I guess time will tell.