On Living 'The Life[tm]'

Today I have a somewhat personal announcement to make ;-) Effectively July first 2006 I’m a full-time independent web developer! What does that mean and why do I find that so exciting? Well, “thereby hangs a tale…[tm]” — so if you will indulge me, here it goes…

I’ve been “working with computers” (a.k.a “what your Mom tells other people what you do”) as single source of income ever since I left school. Except for two one-year-long dot-com-stints that work has always been freelance.

What that meant effectively, was that I was trying to spend as much time as possible playing^Wworking with stuff that interested me (mainly MacOS, BSD and anything that used a socket) and try to make a living from applying those skills. That usually amounted to me fixing stuff for people. The work was ad hoc, billed hourly and over time I acquired a large enough client base by means of word-of-mouth (and reputation, I suppose) to make a decent living while still finding enough time to play and try out new stuff. (One of those new things being Plone, of course, ca. 2003.)

That life style worked just fine and for about two years I basically had my living room at Marienstrasse 11 — the Berlin quarters of the CCC. Good times, good times, indeed…

But that all changed, of course, once I had my own family that I needed to support. Workwise this simply meant, that I had to start to earn more money in less time, given the obvious fact that expenses had risen and that work and play no longer were the only demands put on my time. Besides all the positive changes that life as a family father brings with it (yes, there are!), this also had the unfortunate effect, that I had less time to tinker and hack and needed to spend more time working ‘billable hours’. That sucked. A geek without enough ‘tinkertime’ effectively stops being a geek…

Plus, by increasing my workload I also increased the number of clients and soon I found myself in a place where you don’t really want to be: I had become indispensable and irreplaceable for far too many people. Some days I would have up to twenty(!) support calls from various clients and needed to be at two places at the same time. In short: There were just too many yellow post-it notes on computer screens around town with my phone number on it…

At this point I started outsourcing some of the admin work to befriended colleagues. After a few hiccups this went rather well and freed up time for the family and… yup, developing websites with plone ;-)

Because what I really enjoyed about that work, was that it was not so fast paced, ad hoc and chaotic as the admin work, where most of the work was just fixing what had broken or setting up the umpteenth new workstation. I was mainly just reacting. In contrast to that, I found developing almost soothing. Also, with Python I had finally found a programming language that really suited me and that was fun to code in. And building up expertise is, of course, something any geek thrives upon. After years of “Jack of all trades — Master of None” I finally had found something to focus on for a change.

So, as time went by I became involved in more demanding projects and also with the plone community itself. And I must say, that plone’s community of developers and users was what ‘sealed the deal’ for me. Attending the 2005 Plone Conference in Vienna just proved to me, what I already knew: “Yeah, I can fit in here!”. And two sprints later that hasn’t changed, either…

However, eventhough, most of the work for my admin clients was effectively done by other people by now, I still found that I couldn’t do proper development work. While I now frequently had days where I had no phone calls from client at all — I never knew that in advance, of course and most days I still had to react to unforeseeable ‘emergencies’. I realized, that it meant one thing to outsource work — and quite another to outsource responsibility.

I tried bridging that gap as best as I could for over a year, but it just didn’t feel right — as most compromises do… This forced me to re-think the whole issue and that made me realize, that the only reason I still held on to the admin work and -clients was… fear. Fear of losing a safe source of income. Fear of letting people down with who I had been working with for years. Fear of not being a good enough developer to earn a living and support a family. Fear that I wasn’t replaceable. And, of course, the classic: fear of change itself ;-)

Spelt out like this, I finally realized, how stupid it all was — well, to make this really long story (somewhat) short(er): it took me just about a week to settle the deal and make the necessary arrangements to transfer my client base to the two guys who had been helping me out all along. I wrote a few emails to the major clients, handed over my mobile and presto! And while some clients actually did voice some regret about me not servicing them anymore the majority of reactions were actually very supportive — one of them even congratulated me ;-)

I’m now into my third week of being a full time developer and I can’t tell you, how much I’m enjoying it (although, of course, I’ll try to…). Last week a new project came in (so currently, I’m working on two in parallel) — and the synergy between the two projects is amazing and encouraging. I’ve started hanging out more on #plone, too ;-) I can spend the entire day tackling a specific problem in full confidence that I won’t be called off to some ‘emergency’ at any moment. My weekly bookkeeping session used to take up to three hours — now I’m done in thirty minutes ;-) I sometimes don’t leave my neighbourhood for several days in a row and do everything on foot.

Anyway, I realize this has been a rather lengthy and personal entry but trust me when I say, that I really needed to get this out… and who knows — I even might find myself with more time for blogging now ;-)