Tag: Personal

Six months ago, I left my job to become self employed, again. The last time I became self employed was seven and a half years ago, when I mutually agreed to leave that job due to lack of work and due to my boredom. This time was a bit different as I made the decision completely by myself to leave. Last time, I was quite nervous the first couple of months as I wasn’t guaranteed steady income and didn’t know if I’d have enough work. This time, I was nervous the 2 weeks before I left my job because I didn’t have any work lined up, but luckily all the pieces came together and I landed an ongoing monthly contract.

In my last few posts about being self employed, I mentioned that I was enjoying my work. Things haven’t really changed, except I’ve been put on tougher projects which are quite trying. However, they’re pretty short term and I’ll move onto a new project soon. I’m working with really good people and the work is challenging; when I’m not challenged, I kind of go crazy.

Not only has my work been going well, I’m now consistently running 3 or 4 times a week and have changed my diet. In June, I decided to give up red meat after getting quite sick twice from beef. My wife has been quite supportive of this and has been cooking mostly vegetarian meals for us. It takes a lot of work for her to come up with different ideas and prepare the meals. Before June, I would never have imagined liking vegetarian faire, but it’s pretty good. My diet change and running have helped me lose 15 pounds. I wasn’t overweight, but my weight had increased a little bit in the last few years, something I wanted to reverse.

As I’ve written about numerous times, I’ve also picked up a hobby, something that I never really had before.

So, the last six months have probably been the best six months I’ve had in a long time. I’m enjoying my work, eating well, have a lot less stress, and feel good about myself. The change to becoming self employed again has treated me well. Many factors have lead to this and I have a new outlook on life that took a drastic change for me to see.

It seems like such a simple task for a contractor; bill for the hours you worked. In my profession and how my brain operates, defining “work” is not easy. My brain doesn’t have an on/off switch so at the end of the day, if I was working on something, even if I walk away from the computer, I may still be thinking about it. Same goes for when I run, especially if I’m working on a hard problem.

Tonight as I was giving my son a bath, I realized that code that I had written today (based on other code in the project) could potentially crash in some race conditions. Do I bill the client for only the time that I’m typing? Do I bill the client for 24 hours a day just to make things easy? What is considered work and what isn’t? I don’t really have the answers to those questions; I look at things on a case by case basis. I’ve been doing contract work for a long time now and so far no one has ever questioned by time as I’m very honest and provide a detailed invoice with all of my hours and tasks recorded.

The next part of billing that doesn’t seem clear cut is during the day when I am at my computer, when do I start and stop billing? Do I round to the nearest 15 minutes? Do I bill for every minute? I’ve seen invoices from some contractors that recorded time down to the minute and even one with a fraction of a minute. Do they sit there with a timer and start and stop every time they read and email message? If they get a phone call, do they start billing when they see the caller ID? These just are far too extreme for me. I do reasonable billing and round my billing.

Finally, one area that I still haven’t figured out the best practices is handling interruptions and emergencies. If I get interrupted to work on something else (email, phone call, or instant message), it can take time for me to get back into the thought I had before I got interrupted. Best case it takes me few minutes, worst case, it can take me hours. Who do I bill for this? Do I bill the client that interrupted me or the project  was working on before the interruption? I don’t have a clue.

Luckily all these billing issues are minor and as long as I’m honest and ethical, no one has a problem with my billing practices. It also doesn’t hurt that I get the job done!

It’s now been 3 months since I left my job and became self employed. As I wrote after my first month of being self employed, things are still going quite well. I really like my projects and even though I was recently put on a rush project, I like being able to show something for what I do every day. It should have been no surprise to me that enjoying work affects my whole life, but it is quite easy to forget it as I’ve been wrapped up in my work for my entire career.

While I wasn’t on the wrong track with my life, I now feel that things are going much better with me having time to relax. My side projects are kind of in a limbo state at the moment and will be winding down in the next few months. I’ve decided to not take on side projects for awhile which will be a huge change for me as I’ve had side projects going on (for the most part) since I left college 15 years ago.

I don’t claim to be a life coach or a motivational speaker, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt. I’m quite pleased with how things have worked out for me and am I’m going to do my best to keep on the same track and push work a little down in my priority list (work a full work week, but don’t work like a mad man).

I’ve now been self-employed for a month and things are going quite well. Right as I left my job, pieces fell into place which gave me steady contract work. My contract projects are going well with very little pressure (I don’t consider a deadline a lot of pressure as I simply have to get the work done). Every morning when I start my day, I look at the phone on my desk expecting to see a missed call. It still hasn’t happened; my work no longer consists of going from one emergency to the next.

The projects I’m working on are challenging in that I’ve taken over someone else’s code, but I like challenges. At the moment, I’m mostly just doing bug fixes, but that’s fine with me. I’m pretty much left alone; issues are assigned to me, I fix them. Everyone’s happy.

My stress level has gone down significantly and I feel like I’ve gotten my life back. I’m still probably in the honeymoon phase (I know I’ve said that before) of self-employment, but I’m hopeful that this feeling will continue.

Today, my wife and I got the opportunity to rid in a Zeppelin run by Airship Ventures. The other day, I realized that I’ve been on a number of different aircraft ranging from airplanes (commercial down to a homemade one my uncle built), a hot air balloon, and 4 separate helicopter trips. Today I got to add an airship to that list.

The tour took us from San Diego’s Montgomery Field to the coast, south to downtown and then back to Montgomery field. The ride is some much different than any other type of aircraft as it’s quiet, moves pretty slowly (top speed is less than 80 mph), and flies relatively low. Like the other passengers, I didn’t stop taking pictures; I posted a bunch of pictures on my server. I didn’t realize that my GPS data logger wasn’t on until part way through the flight, so the map is missing some points. This site is using a product called JetPhoto Studio which I plan on reviewing at a later time (putting the site up with the map took just a few minutes, so that’s one feature that is really cool about it).

It’s really hard to describe the flight other than amazing. While you can take a helicopter tour of San Diego, I don’t think you can beat this for getting a full view of the city and getting to take in the breathtaking views.

Now that I’ve been self-employed for almost a week (Monday was my last day at my job), I feel like my life has changed a bit. There was nothing wrong with my old company or my old job, except that it just wasn’t for me. Prior to taking the job, I spent 5.5 years self-employed, so I really got used to the freedom and being my own boss. I feel like I’m back in control of my work as I have a schedule for one of my projects (or will soon) which will let me figure out when I need to work really hard and when I can work at a normal pace. In the world of software, most projects have schedules which helps in planning a workload. In the world of IT, there may be projects with schedules, but there always will be things that have to get done immediately (someone can’t get to a server or a computer doesn’t work; you can’t schedule those things in or delay fixing them).

Things seem to be much calmer as I start my day around 9 am and end around 5 pm; before when I got up, there seemed to always be something going on when I first checked my email at 7 am (also partly because almost everyone I worked with was 2 hours ahead). In addition, in this first week, I feel like I’m making progress towards a goal (the ship date for the current phase of my project).

This may be my “honeymoon” phase of being self-employed, so my excitement may wear down. However, I’m going to do my best to keep a positive attitude and make it so that my job doesn’t take over my life. I know that this isn’t easy to do, but it’s a goal that I’m making for myself.

If I ever decide to work for someone else, I need to look back on this post and evaluate if that is for me.

When I was in college, I had no idea what I was going to do. I was in a general engineering program at Harvey Mudd College which was going to prepare me to be a “general engineer”. Would a company hire me when I didn’t have a speciality? I had no idea and really didn’t think about it much. During the winter break of my junior year, I wrote a program called NotifyMail which you could consider “push notification” to alert me of new email. Way back then I was addicted to email and wanted to know instantly when I had email. This was the turning point in defining my career.

For the next 14 years, I wrote a lot of software. I wrote so much code that engineers called me “Dash” from the Incredibles! I lost track of the number of products I worked on, but do have a collection of product boxes and brochures on shelves in my office. 18 months ago, I was tired of writing code, so I accepted my current position where I’d write very little, if any, code, but would do more R&D as well as run IT for a small company.

In my spare time for the last 6 months or so, I’ve been working on a coding project that really got me to think about what I love to do. It turns out that I love to write code. There is something about the challenge of writing code as well as the freedom in writing code that really keeps me going. Sometimes I get obsessed with writing code so much that I can’t sleep trying to solve a problem. Also, being able to say “yeah, I wrote that” and getting feedback from users is pretty cool.

After much personal reflection, I came to the conclusion that I needed to go back to writing code and get out of the world of IT. Last week I tendered my resignation and I’ll soon be self-employed again doing contract software development focusing on Macintosh and iPhone/iPad applications. This change, of course, does not come lightly, but I believe it is the right move.

If you have a need for a highly talented (and modest :-)) software engineer, please let me know.

Most people my age have not yet experienced the joys of having a colonoscopy. A few of us are lucky enough to not only have had 1, but 2 colonoscopies. My 2nd was yesterday and boy was it fun. The procedure itself isn’t too bad; it’s pretty quick and I was sedated during it (I remember Tom, the nurse handing me my glasses so I could see my colon on the screen), and before I knew it I was done. When I got home, I slept for 3 hours.

The bad part of a colonoscopy is the prep for it. The day before the procedure, I could only consume fluids and eat Jell-O (no red or purple colored, however). Then starting at 4 pm, I had to drink GoLYTELY (actually a generic of it). I was supposed to drink a gallon of it, but only made it through about 3/4 of a gallon when I knew I was completely cleaned out. I’ll let the reader imagine what getting cleaned out means…let’s just say it isn’t fun.

I’m hoping my doctor has some pictures for me when I see him in several weeks!