I Have a New Job

Saturday, October 15th 2011 11:52am

For the past two years, I have been mainly surviving off a bouncer position at a local club and bar. I've slowly moved up. Tonight will be the first time I bar tend an actual show! But this is not what I mean by 'new job'.

I have been doing web work here and there, mostly for friends. I did have a couple contacts for a while that outsourced work to me. Somewhen, I realized that these 'over-the-net' work relationships were not only frustrating, but unsatisfying as well. I botched one up because the designer had weeks in between each update, and I started (re)working from an older, incorrect iteration of the project resulting in a lot of confusion and lost hours. The other, I simply lost interest: Each project was something different, often times a different developer platform and/or language.

And, so, I pretty much decided I wasn't going to seek out web work any longer; That I had my hobbies, and tinkering on web sites was one of them. If a friend needs help, I'll help for dirt cheap, but only so much.

Working at the bar you meet a lot of interesting characters. There are very few code monkeys. One of them has a startup on his hands, venture capital and all that. They're a little behind schedule and need someone to handle the cosmetics of the project, the user interface. After several months of hearing he might have a need for me, I was called in for an interview. They have a really nice office in downtown Ann Arbor. We talked about the project for 30 minutes, one of them drinking a beer, and then they made an offer I couldn't refuse.

They didn't make me sign a nondisclosure agreement, but they won't let me keep any code on my laptop in case it gets stolen. So, it is a hush-hush *don't blab about our plans* sort of operation. I run a local server off a flash drive that stays there. They've got me adjusting php kohana template files, CSS and jQuery javascript. A perfect fit for my skill set.

I've had to learn some new stuff too: Commit, push, and pull with a Git repository (and the whole mess of setting that up in Windows). Vim because suddenly my favorite text editor of the past 8 years wasn't cool anymore. The OSX terminal looks pretty snazzy! Who knew?!?! Oh, and the insanity that is kohana's directory tree. :P

I'm gonna keep both jobs. It all feels really good, like going down the correct path. Funny how what you want is out of reach until you give up on it. xD

posted by Langel

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