Today is my last day of work as a VelocIT employee, a company I helped start and had (and still have) high hopes for as employee #1.
No, I’m not being fired for blogging too much or embezzling funds. No, there wasn’t a big falling out with partners in the company throwing books at each other and screaming expletives. Unfortunately, nothing dramatic and tabloid-worthy like that happened at all.
I simply lost interest in being a consultant and I blame Subtext. Micah Dylan, the CEO and Founder of VelocIT and my good friend, and I often talked about the idea that there are two general types of developers (I’m sure there are many more).
- Developers who are easily bored and love to learn about new businesses and business models. Staying on one project forever would cause these devs to go insane. They love the excitement of jumping from client to client and project to project.
- Developers who love to craft and hone a single code-base through multiple versions. These devs are fine sticking with a project for a long time and get enjoyment in watching the application take form over the years.
For a long time, I’ve been more firmly in camp #1 with tendencies towards #2. But over the past couple of years working on Subtext, I’ve never gotten bored with working on the same code and realized I have been in Camp #2 for a good while now.
Sure, I do get excited about learning new technologies all the time, but now it is in the context of how they will help me make Subtext a better blog engine.
Not only that, I found that what I most love about the Subtext project is not just the craft of developing an application over multiple versions, but the joy in building a community around that project.
Maybe this is because with Subtext, my "clients" are other developers. I understand developers better than I do other clients because their pain is often my pain. I just don’t have the same pains that a Director of Marketing does (well actually I kind of do with Subtext, but I don’t have any budget to address those pains so I ignore the pain).
My heart just hasn’t been in consulting for a good while now, but I couldn’t leave while we were struggling along at the brink of going out of business. So I pushed on, helped land a big client, and now it looks like VelocIT is close to having more projects on its hands than employees! So if you love consulting and software development, send Jon Galloway your resume.
I will still be involved with VelocIT in a limited capacity. Discussions are still underway, but I hope to remain on as a Board Member and shareholder. The team we’ve assembled at VelocIT are among the best and brightest I have ever worked with. I love working with them and working from home. I willl certainly miss all of that.
So where am I going next?
I’ll be taking a position with Koders Inc. as the Product Manager of the Koders.com website, an Open Source code search engine. I think this will be a good fit for me due to my passion for open source software.
My goal is to as much as possible help developers become more productive via search driven development and the services that naturally extend from that.
Naturally, the best way to do that is to provide relevant search results. But beyond that, I believe that building an active community around the site via tools, widgets, and APIs that developers can use in their own projects will also be very important in being a useful resource for developers. Koders is for coders and developers.
I’ll be relying on your feedback regarding the site’s usability and how well it helps you to be more productive to help me do my job. In other words, I’m going to take my lazy butt and try and ride your coattails in order to do my job well. Is that genius or what? ;)
One thing I really like about the site so far is the project browser. Check out the browser for the MbUnit project. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate that into your project homepage, your CruiseControl.NET build, or even replace the the CodePlex code browser with that? (hint hint Codeplex).
In any case, wish me luck. This is probably the most difficult job change ever for me since it’s not just a job that I’m leaving, and not just a job that I’m joining.
One funny part of this I won’t tell you yet. But you’ll laugh when you hear the name we chose for our son, which we chose before all this happened.