Recently in Work Category

My former employer, Motricity, finally officially announced laying off a boatload of people this morning.

I've weighed in quite a bit on Motricity and their baffling business strategies on the MocoNews post that talked about rumors of layoffs; going by what most of us former employees have said, this has been expected for a looooooong time.

Best wishes go out to all of those affected by layoffs; I still know a few folks who have stuck around this long; they should be at least expecting a nice severance package and some time to look for something new. I worked with plenty of very talented people there who I expect will be able to get back on their feet pretty quick.

Good luck to all!

So DevJam officially ended Friday, and now it's time for LinuxWorld.

If you're here in San Francisco, please, stop by the .org pavilion and say "hi!" We will be showing off OpenNMS 1.3.6 and hanging out with the other über-geeks. ;)

So along with some other folks, I was laid off from my job at Raritan today. Although I'm disappointed to be leaving a stellar group of people to work with, I'm heartened by the outpouring of commiseration (and job offers!) from everyone. Thank you so much!

If you know of anything interesting for a Perl/Java/Mac/Open-Source/Geek kind of person, let me know. And check out my resume while you're at it. ;)

So this last week I was at OSCON. I met a lot of awesome people, some of whom I'd met online and finally got to see in person. I also learned a ton about a lot of things, but really, The Buzz® was Rails, Rails, Rails.

I've played with Ruby on Rails off and on for a few months, and I was very impressed, but I learned a new appreciation for it at OSCON. There were a ton of good training classes and experts able to explain the stuff that up until now I'd been using without really knowing what it means... (which is common if you've just picked up the 15-minute demo and thought "man, that's cool, I want to try it!")

Of course, I hate having anything installed on my system without it being package-managed, so I went ahead and packaged up everything up to Rails as well as a few extras -- Streamlined (a featureful replacement for the scaffold that was just announced at OSCON), and ferret (a port of the excellent Lucene search engine to Ruby).

It's dead easy to package up gems in Fink, so if there's anything that makes Rails easier for you that's missing, please let me know and I'll try packaging it.

I'm here in Portland at OSCON until Friday night. If you're here, send me an e-mail and we can try to find each other and say "hi". I've gone ahead and set up a "Birds of a Feather" meet-up, at 8:30pm Wednesday night, in room F150. If you're interested in Fink, give us a visit.

If you're not at OSCON, well, you're missing out. ;)

Looks like I'm lucky enough to have work send me to OSCON this year, in Portland, OR! (Yay!)

If you want to hang out, please drop me a line, it'd be cool to put some faces to names. And if you're a SourceForge person and want to kill me now, well, I'll be there for you too. :)

So I've got news I totally wouldn't have expected to have even a year ago. Last week I gave my 2 weeks' notice, and I'm going to be going to work for Raritan. So you're thinking, "that's not so strange. A new job? Happens to lots of people." Hah! Well, Raritan is the company that ended up with the Oculan intellectual property. :)

But wait, there's more! This time around, I'm going to be a Java developer (which I've been doing a little on the side at my current job, and really actually enjoying). I'm really looking forward to giving the Oculan codebase another chance at life, and to work on it a little more deeply, rather than just making RPMs and twinking perl scripts. The technology was always good, so it will be nice to see what Raritan can do with it.

Wish me luck!

I accepted today an offer with PinPoint (well, PowerByHand), doing freaky perl stuff. :)

Whoohoo!

So I've been unemployed for a week, as of 3 hours ago. =)

In Fink news, I've been working on entirely repackaging PostgreSQL 7.3, and packaging PostgreSQL 7.4, so that they can coexist (and so that the bugs in the 7.3 packages are fixed).

Other than that, it's been all business. My resume has gone through a number of revisions (and will probably see more). I've applied for a number of jobs (including one at RedHat, phear). I've applied for individual insurance. I've applied for unemployment benefits. It's crazy how busy you are when you're out of a job. =)

I've gotten a bunch of pledges for doing development on Fink/KDE full-time, although nothing anywhere near a living wage, I'm sorry to say. I don't really see how on-demand development would make that any different; especially since there are still big infrastructure things that would have to happen in all of KDE before there's any specific features that could be worked on. It would be great to be able to do it full-time, but it seems unless I get a big benefactor, it wouldn't be enough. Feel free to prove me wrong, though... <grin>

I guess I'm just rambling so that I could have an update, it's been a strange ride being simultaneously insanely busy and having nothing I have to do. There's a lot going on right now that will hopefully bear fruit. Wish me luck!

I am now officially unemployed.

The company I so recently worked for has now shut it's doors. We had an incredible product, but the money ran out and the VC wasn't willing to continue funding. There's various hypotheses why, but I don't want to air the dirty laundry here. Suffice it to say this is by far the best group of people I've ever worked with -- everyone there was simply stunningly talented, and fun to work with to boot.

If you know of any work in the Raleigh area (or telecommute), especially in the open-source and/or macintosh arena, drop me a line.

Oh, and my resume's here. =)

[Update:]

So let me ask you a hypothetical question. If I were to do what Yoram Snir suggested in the comments, would you pledge? Because there's nothing I'd love more than to be able to just work on Fink and KDE full time. Is it worth bothering some kind of pledge thing to gauge it? This would be a dream, but I don't know if I could pull enough to live off of.

[Update:]

A number of press sites picked up our press release about Oculan shutting down:

• Triangle Business Journal
• CRN
• News and Observer
• NetworkWorld Fusion

Someone from the N&O is supposed to call me today, they're going to be running a piece about how we all stay in touch after the company imploded. I set up a mailing list for our ex-employees to keep in touch, exchange resume help and job leads, and just goof around. Maybe the exposure will help me get something. =)