Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 06 Sep 2005 22:48:00 GMT
It’s been an interesting experience setting up my home office over the past few days. I remember my parents going through a similar experience when I was in high school–they bought a copier, a fax machine, a new business phone, waited for the telco to install a new line, dealt with the yellow pages people, and spent a couple days in the car dealing with all of the paperwork and supplies required.
So fast-forward to the modern sysadmin-turned-consultant’s home office:
- Computer: have several. Can produce more from spare parts if needed.
- Copier, fax: have one of those already.
- Office phone line: 5 minutes via the website of my VoIP provider.
- Office phone: dug an old phone out of a box and plugged it into my Asterisk server. It’s nice having a home PBX.
- Advertising: this blog, networking via friends, releasing newer and more exciting open-source software.
- Business email and web server: I already have those. I can create more accounts and sites as needed.
- Business licenses: they’re all available online now, although Washington State’s site requires either IE or Netscape 4, and putting Safari into “lie about your User-Agent string” isn’t good enough.
It’s amazing how easy it is to set up a small business office when your house is already higher-tech then most companies.
Tags business, consulting, home, homeoffice | 3 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 02 Sep 2005 02:26:00 GMT
Yesterday was an interesting day–my now-former employer is restructuring “to support changes in direction and a new funding strategy,” so I’m now looking at new modes of employment, as are several former co-workers.
I’m viewing this as more of an opportunity to move on to new things, rather then a setback. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few months thinking about what I wanted to do next, even though I didn’t expect this job to end quite so suddenly.
Here’s what I’ve decided:
- I don’t want to work on long, slow, multi-year projects. The world doesn’t work that way anymore. Agility is the future, and I’m not going to enjoy working for any company that takes years to bring a product to market.
- I want to work on things that I enjoy and challenge me, like Ruby and Rails.
- I want to spend less time commuting.
- I’d like the freedom to follow interesting trends and opportunities as they arise, for my own profit and the profit of those I work for.
With these goals in mind, I’ve decided to start looking for Rails consulting/contract work, although I’m also willing to consider full-time employment in the right environment. Please forgive a bit of shameless self-promotion:
My background is a combination of Unix system administration and programming; I’m very good at getting things to work and keeping them working. I’ve been programming professionally since 1988, I have 3 years of Ruby experience, over 6 months of Rails experience, and 13 years of Linux experience. I’m a major contributor to Typo, a Rails-based blog engine; I can easily provide code samples for those who are interested. I’ve written extensively about Typo, Rails, and Ruby here on my blog, feel free to look around. I was once the senior system administrator in charge of over 700 production Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems in a 24x7 environment; I can handle any level of system administration task that may be required.
Most importantly, I’m used to working with small groups of people to design effective, scalable, and affordable solutions to their problems.
Over the next few days I’ll post more details on this site, including a resume and some details on previous experiences. For now, if you have questions, please feel free to send me email, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Tags consulting, layoff, rails, ruby, seattle | 1 comment
