A Rob Update - A busy few months
I asked for short-term work, and people responded and the past couple of months have found me doing quite a bit of work in C# and JavaScript, as well as throwing together a puppet set-up for a client (with a vagrant dev environment), and spending a couple of weeks at a data analytics company learning Cascalog and building some pretty charts. (As well as delivering a few conference talks)
It has been a great few months, and as we near the end of September I find myself with a few surprising findings:
I actually quite like working in an office
While I strongly desire the freedom to work from coffee shops (especially on those mornings where I just want to put my head down and throw some code at the laptop), when given this freedom I've actually ended up going into the client offices on a regular basis. I enjoy joking with people, drinking coffee with people and making friends with the team.
This has definitely made me feel a bit more flexible with regards to the kind of client work I'm happy to pick up.
two weeks isn't always enough
I've been quite strict about taking work from clients that we keep it to very short term sprints of two weeks, with the idea that
- It encourages focus from the client - what do you actually want from me?
- It encourages focus from me - I must ship it
- It allows for me to get involved with a bigger variety of teams/technologies/products
That said, I feel as if I left a bit of a trail behind me at one of my clients when I handed over what I'd done but hadn't spent sufficient time (with a very busy team) making sure everybody understood what I had done, how far I was through it and what work was still remaining.
I feel as if I should be more flexible about this and under the right circumstances I think I'll be happy to take on a greater duration of work providing the reasons for this are clearly discussed.
Folk only get fragments of my opinion over the internet
Folk! While I might rant about Angular/KO/Ember/etc not being necessary, and definitely advocate the use of small libraries over all-encompassing frameworks, I'm still happy to work with these technologies.
The number of people/potential clients who I have had this conversation with has genuinely surprised me and made me realise I need to tone it down a little bit when on this subject or any other for that matter. "Oh, we have work but it's AngularJS so will you actually like it?" - I'm actually pretty pragmatic about this subject and will always defer to the team when I'm project hopping because it would be unfair for me force them into doing something unfamiliar and then fly away again!
I really enjoy learning
While I've always learned stuff through the projects I persue both in and outside of work, it has never been an actual goal to learn anything. However - I've really started actively trying to learn Clojure/functional programming and during my time at Mastodon realised that some basic stats knowledge might go a long way in the industries in which the technologies I'm enjoying at present.
So, I've signed up to the Coursera Statistics One course for the next few months and intend on following that through. It's an exciting notion that I can just click a button on the internet and then be attached to an online learning course in which I'll be taught new skills.
Where am I going with this
Well, I've got a few months now until the end of the year, and I'm really enjoying doing what I'm doing and I feel as if I'm delivering real value to the clients I've worked with so far. I want to plan out some work between now and the new year holidays that doesn't get in the way of my learning (statistics/clojure) and allows me to deliver some awesome things for people.
I think I'd be happy to take on some longer term stuff (up to 6 weeks) for the right people, so please do get in touch if you have something. (Anywhere in Europe is good, I'm also thinking I wouldn't mind getting out of London/England for a little bit too).
My hiring details can be found on my availability page (long since gone), just drop me an email at robashton@codeofrob.com and we'll see what we can do together.