Status report, 15 April 2008
There’s a lot of stuff on my plate right now. Everything is progressing reasonably well:
- Client A is still causing trouble, but they appear satisfied for now.
- The Mutex Labs website design is looking very good. I’ve also started writing content for it, so that should be up in the next couple of weeks.
- I’ve started narrowing my focus for consulting work. I’m going to start out focusing on embedded C coding, particularly the Gumstix platform. I’ve been writing a list of things that I’m good at and would like to work with, so that should lead nicely to a list of capabilities for consulting work.
- I’ve also been trawling local job sites to see what is going. There’s a surprisingly large amount of work available. The old pains of dealing with recruiter ads is showing - “must have xyz in the SDLC”, “must have 93 years of experience in brand new tech Y”, “must be an expert at buttering bread”. Stupid stuff like that. I’m trying a different tack this time and seeing if I can more or less bypass the ad and get people excited about the package that I bring, rather than just checking boxes on the ad. It’s going to be interesting to see if I can convince employers to let me work independently from my office rather than being a short-term full-time contractor.
- Something that is working quite well for me is looking on freelancer sites like Elance and getting in contact with the people with work available. I’m generally not able to compete with overseas programmers, price-wise, but I can offer things like business relationships or I-build-it-you-license-it-from-me type of deals. That’s fine for me - I love building things and I want to work on my product portfolio. I have two hardware projects on the burner and a very interesting third in discussion.
- I’ve even been working on SyncDroid! I’m in the middle of some really hairy multi-threading-uncertain-relationships code, but it’s coming along slowly. I think that once that’s out of the way I can start using it on a day-to-day basis. At some point I have to do a bunch of UI coding, but I’m avoiding that for now.
Something that I’m going to have to watch is not taking on too much at once. I love the feeling of a new project, but I fall down when it comes to actually completing them.
I’ve noticed that money appearing in my bank account improves my motivation quite a bit. This is probably the main factor that is encouraging me to look for work at all - just that nice reassurance every couple of weeks. I don’t need the money right now. I just need to know that if I want to, I can earn some cash. Conversely, big projects like SyncDroid are difficult for me to stay focused on because I don’t see any immediate payoff and won’t for a while.