This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jared Richardson. Original Post: My Year in Review Feed Title: 6th Sense Analytics Feed URL: http://www.6thsenseanalytics.com/?feed=rss Feed Description: The 6th Sense Analytics corporate blog Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jared Richardson Latest Posts From 6th Sense Analytics

This year has involved a lot of change for me and I keep getting email from friends asking how it's all gone. In true geek fashion, I decided to write a blog entry with all the relevant information. I'll still answer everyone's email, but I thought this would be a bit more efficient.

The biggest news of the year was leaving SAS and working full-time as a consultant. This has gone extremely well for me, and it's a decision I don't regret at all. SAS has some great people and has many great aspects, but I'm really enjoying the work I'm doing now. What's good about my current situation?

• I've gotten to work, and continue to work, with some very smart people on some interesting projects. That's fun.

• The IT department. I no longer have to justify my second monitor to the IT overlords. I do have to justify it to myself though.

• My work environment is awesome. I ~control~ the thermostat in my office now... mainly because it's in the bonus room of my house. :) I have a huge U shaped desk that takes up half the room, courtesy of triangle.forsale.

• The commute is wonderful. I only lived 5 miles from SAS, but now I just head down the hallway in the morning. No traffic, no rain, and no frost on the windshield.

• Opportunity... the freedom to do what I want is great. When I was working full-time and I wanted to speak, it meant taking vacation time. (Hint to employers... having your team members speak at various venues means they are bringing back good ideas and establishing your company as a place smart people can thrive. Any other attitude just drives good people away.) Now I can take Monday off when I speak over the weekend at a No Fluff software symposium.

• The hourly wage... initially I had a lot of trouble settling in to being hourly. It was very difficult to get a 40-hour week. I wanted to help my wife by taking the kids to school, take my wife out to lunch, be there for the kids after school... all great things, but things that make it difficult to get in a solid block of time. I find that I need a solid block of time to get real work done... to get my head into the problem and get it solved.

  But in the last few months I've really hit my stride on this front. A lot of factors have come into play, but things are working really well. We've all been in a situation where someone has asked us to buckle down and get something done this week. We've put in the time and gotten the job done. But now I get paid for all those extra hours! Instead of waiting to see if a quarterly or annual bonus might cover all those extra hours, I bill for them and get paid for them. I've had a couple 60+ hour weeks recently, but it's been doing really fun work, so it didn't feel like that much time.

• Remote pair programming has been a blast. On this project I've been pairing with people like Scott Davis and Nick Laicona using Sub Etha Edit and Skype. I'll try to blog on this soon, but let me say it's very cool to pair program with someone in a different time zone!

It's not been perfect though... I had one hiccup where I thought I might be applying for jobs. That was not a fun week, but it took care of itself. And trying to get into the groove of working at home alone was rough. It's a very different way of working.

And I've been busy. Any type of family concern (like a recital) seems to collide with client deadlines. I took my family to Disney in Orlando, Florida, but still had to get in around 20 hours for a client. My family flew home without me while I flew to Pittsburgh for a client meeting. As I type this I'm at about 24,000 feet, winging my way home on Sunday night, a day later than my family. With any luck my wife will have finished all the unpacking. :)

All in all, I'm really enjoying consulting. I do very much appreciate the job offers that come my way, but for the time being, I'm where I need to be.

What else is going on?

I plan to speak at as many of the No Fluff events as I can. I just finished a chapter on integrating Ruby with both Java and C for the 2007 No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology... the 2006 Anthology, for which I wrote two chapters, still gets a good review here and there. I've done several speaking engagements for various companies and I'm sure I'll continue to do those.

I bought a Mac this year... and I love it. Whether the platform is more secure or less targeted (or both!), it's nice to be rid of the constant security concerns that come with a Windows box. There are more Apple purchases on the horizon for me.

This was the year I got serious about Ruby and Rails. It's both refreshing and frustrating to move on from Java after so many years... those learning muscles had gotten a bit rustier than I thought they had. :) Working them again made me a bit sore, but it feels good.

Oh yes, I got braces... Guy Kawasaki said I should.. or he said that speakers should improve their teeth. ;) Seriously, as much speaking as I'm doing, it was something I needed to do. I should've done this when I was in high school, but better late than never. The first week was bad. A bit of advice... the week before you go to Disney is not the time to get braces put on your teeth. :) After the doc put them on, the nurse asked why I was getting them so close to a vacation... I could only plead ignorance.

And finally, my blog just passed the 100,000 unique IP mark. 103,836 to be exact. Thanks everyone! Of course, that's over a year and a half, not in a day, but it still makes me happy. :)

Merry Christmas all.

Jared

Note: I managed to overwrite this blog entry with the next one (on the portable EDVO WiFi hotspot... sorry about that! I think I've fixed it now.) -jrr