Category: Personal

Must read this on Friday morning:

• A job interview is not a test of my worth as a human being
• Getting through to the next round of an interview series, or being offered a job, is not a validation of my existence
• If offered a job, I am not under any kind of obligation to accept it
• Accepting a good offer for a bad job leads to stress, misery, self-doubt, and despair
• A job interview is the prime (and possibly only) opportunity to find out if the job is bad for me. Use this opportunity wisely.

I took the Microsoft exam 70-320 (“Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework”) this morning, and passed. Not a difficult exam, as these things go. As usual, I went into it worrying I was under-prepared, and came out of it thinking that I’d spent way too much time studying for it. Meh.

This August is going to be a training month for me. My last contract finished at the end of July, and I have a new one lined up for the start of September. As well as this morning’s exam, I’ve got two more scheduled for the week after next: 70-229 (SQL Server) and 70-316 (Winforms with C#). Assuming I pass those, that will sort me out with my MCSD for .NET certification. That’s the main goal for the month.

As well as that, I intend to get myself up to speed on WordPress and ExpressionEngine. And now that I’ve got my MSDN Universal subscription up and running, it would be kind of groovy to start rocking on an MCMS install, too. Content management, yeah baby!

Not to forget all the work I still have to do here on Sunpig to get the new site design and structure finished. Plus there’s a couple of friends’ sites I have promised to sort out. And I’ve got a nifty little Movable Type hack I need to write up. And…and…

Turns out that August is probably going to be busier than a normal month of work.

Oh, and I baked an apple pie this afternoon! Mmmmmmmm….Pie…..

Just when I thought I was getting myself straightened out and toughened up with the proper contractor mindset, along comes something like this:

“Amazon.com is delighted to announce the launch of a new software development centre in Edinburgh. The new centre offers a unique opportunity to be a part of a rather unusual start-up — one which will serve 41 million active customer accounts around the world.

“We are now looking for outstanding individuals across a number of different areas of expertise to join the start-up team.

“The Centre will be imagining and building new and innovative features for our global family of web sites. Deciding exactly what we’ll do is in no small way up to you, but it will certainly involve the building of scaleable distributed systems which offer superb performance while operating over huge datasets, and will require us to stretch the frontiers of e-commerce and our creative talent.”

If I had to choose a company I would really like to work at, there would be two on the shortlist: Microsoft and Amazon. I know that I have slagged Microsoft in the past for some dodgy business practices, but the fact is that they a) create some excellent products, b) have thousands of smart, interesting, and creative people working for them, and c) are almost universally acknowledged as being a great employer. Amazon may be an independent bookseller’s nightmare, but there is no other company that has done as much as they have to make web commerce work. They are ruthlessly focused on making web shopping not just a simple experience, but an interesting, pleasureable, and satisfying one.

Me, I’m all about the User Experience. Interaction design, information architecture, web standards compliance, accessibility, semantic web–that’s where I’m at, baby. That designer job they’ve got going? It’s mine. Hands off.

PS: to any Amazon HR staff reading this: hi! My CV will be with you shortly!

Since seeing my doctor last month about the persistent pain in my wrist and shoulder, my wrist has recovered almost completely. Throwing a bundle of remedies at the wrist (changing mouse hands, changing desk and chair at home, wrist bandage, and prodigous quantities of anti-inflammatories) seems to have given it enough of an opportunity to heal up. Unfortunately, as my wrist got better, my shoulder got worse. (Or so it seemed. It might well have been just as bad all along, but cloaked by the higher-priority wrist pain.)

The other remedy my doctor lined up for me was physiotherapy, and I had my first appointment yesterday morning. Based on previous experiences with physiotherapy, I was expecting to come away from the session with a list of tips to improve my posture, and a photocopied sheet of daily exercises to strengthen my shoulder muscles. What actually happened was more like magic.

While lying down on my back, the therapist manipulated my neck by lifting up my head and rolling it around from side to side. Then she picked up my right arm and spent about ten minutes gently pulling, pressing, and twisting it in the air like a snake charmer. She suspected that a bundle of nerves had got bunched up and uncomfortably twisted, and she was trying to “unwind” them. She kept her eyes closed for most of the time, concentrating on what she was doing with her hands. It felt like an odd and very focused kind of massage, punctuated by occasional sharp bursts of pain when she pushed my arm into the zones that had been giving me trouble.

When I sat up again, I felt a pleasant glow spreading from my shoulder down to my elbow, and I found that the arm had complete freedom of movement again with almost no pain. To be honest, I was shocked. I really hadn’t expected the change to be so complete and so sudden. But it was an enormously pleasant sensation to be able to rotate my arm in a full circle again without it hurting.

The therapist said that there is probably some soft tissue bruising that might take some time to heal, and that a further session or two might be necessary to work out some final knots and twists, but essentially I’m fixed. Wow.

For the rest of the day yesterday I couldn’t quite believe how good the shoulder felt. I found myself tensing up, and not using my right arm too much, out of fear that I might break the spell. But even now, a day later, the pain is still mostly gone.

Hey, going to the driving range might start being fun again!

You know how every now and then something you read or hear will just click with your current situation, and provide an answer to a question that has been plaguing you? Happened to me twice today.

The first one was Rands’s new article on What To Do When You’re Screwed. An early paragraph framed the issue for me:

“You’re a manager now. Congratulations. Either you sucked at programming and wanted to try a different influence avenue or you’re fed up with every other manger you’ve worked for and now you’re going to REALLY GOING TO SHOW US how it’s done.”

Now, I’m not a manager. I’m a developer. What managing I have done has showed me that I REALLY DON’T want to go there. But once you get to a certain point in your career as a developer, it can seem like the only way to move onwards and upwards is to take that position as a team leader, and get your foot on the management ladder.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Amongst other things, I’ve been fretting about the fact that at 32 years old, I’ve got a decade of work behind me, but another 30-40 years ahead of me, and what the hell am I going to for all that time? Will there still even be a software industry in the mid 21st century?

Rands then goes on:

“I’m assuming you’ve have passion regarding your professional career. You want to do more. You want make more money and, if it all works out well, you want to change the world.

“Maybe I haven’t been kicked in the shins enough, but it baffles me when I run into folks who are coasting through life. Doing the bare minimum to get by and… enjoying it? What exactly are you enjoying?”

Another thing I often worry about is that I don’t have much “ambition” in the traditional sense. I have no burning desire to be famous, or run my own company, or retire by the time I’m 40. Professionally, what I really want to do is be recognized for the quality of my work. I want to work on products that will be appreciated. I want my efforts to make other people’s lives just a little bit better, easier, or more enjoyable. I’m more of a craftsman than an entrepreneur.

Sure, I’d like to earn lots of money. I’d like to be rich enough to retire at 40. But what would I do after that? I think I would probably carry on doing what I do right now in my spare time: write, design web sites, build software. I’m sure I’d make some time for the wife and kids, and I’d watch movies, and play games; but fundamentally I think I’d be driven to make things.

All of which really means that what I really want to do is exactly what I’m doing now–only more so.

Being a contractor/consultant is not the same as being an employee. I have to take charge of my own training, and keep my skills sharp. I’m not working towards a promotion within a single company: I’m trying to enhance my reputation and make myself valuable to a range of clients. The reason I decided to move into contracting was not for the money, but to do more building and making, and to get better at doing these things, because that is what I want to do.

Sometimes these goals slip my mind; when they do, I lose velocity, I stall, and my mood sinks.

“Good managers keep their teams, their products, and their careers full of velocity.

“Velocity.

“That’s a better term than upward mobility. Constant forward momentum.”

I’m my own manager now. Gotta remember that.

The second click of the day was a pointer from Eric Sink’s new MSDN column (Hazards of Hiring) to an article he wrote last year: Career Calculus.

Thanks for the reminders, guys. Turns out my glasses were on my forehead the whole time.