Dougal,

Please find attached the formal offer. Sign a copy and bring it with you
on Dec 6th, but for now just indicate your acceptance via email and I’ll
start the paperwork rolling. Let me know if you have any questions.

I’ll be a Senior Software Engineer for a small-but-growing tech company that survived the dot-com bust. From what I know so far, my primary responsibility will be to refactor a largish web application written in perl. And, of course, “any other duties as deemed appropriate and necessary by management.”

Like most of my other employment in the past, the job lead came to me via my personal network. In this case, Eric Dodd, who I don’t really know very well, actually. We’re pretty sure that we probably met each other at some LUNA meetings several years ago. We think. But we do know that we both know Rod Montgomery. And Eric uses WordPress, and he’s a geek, so he’s my kind of people. And that whole job lead thing is a-okay in my book, so hurrah for Eric!

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I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about all the little things I’m thankful for. But really, there are only a few things that really matter. In particular there are two rather big things worth mentioning here now.

The first one is a new job. I’ve really enjoyed the contract work that I’ve been doing since moving to the Atlanta area. It’s been a good mix of system administration and web application development, which are two of my favorite things. And the flexibility of working from home has been a great boon (until you find yourself working through the weekend to make up the hours you spent running errands). But I’ve continued to search for a full-time job with the usual benefits, lower health insurance costs, lower tax burden, paid holidays, etc. You start to miss those things when you don’t have them for a while. Anyhow, I interviewed for a position as a perl developer a couple of weeks ago, and I just got a message yesterday with an offer for the job. I’ll probably post more details after it’s properly official.

The other big thing I’m thankful for is… Well, it’s still in the works, so to speak.

Or maybe I should say it’s a little thing. Well, it’s little now. But growing.

Susan and I are having a baby

Okay, that’s enough computer time for today. I think I’ll go join my family again. They’re watching a Jimmy Neutron movie, and I’m missing all the burping. But more importantly, the pecan and pumpkin pies should almost be cool enough to eat now

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It was a bit of an odd experience, in a way. I’ve never really been in a position before that I could turn down what normally would be a good job at a modestly decent salary. I almost felt guilty for doing it. But who knows — maybe one day they’ll have another position suited for me, with a higher budget. Fortunately, I still have my current consulting contract, and another short-term consultation gig in the works.

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Instead, I’m referring to work opportunities. I find myself in the rare, enviable position of having several different full-time and contract job possibilities. I had given up on hearing back from Emory University, since it had been several weeks since my last communication with them. But last week, I received a phone call from them saying that they were ready to make an offer. I met with them earlier this week to negotiate salary. I’m still debating whether to accept the offer or not, since it’s lower than I had hoped for, and is in the borderline area for being able to pay all our monthly bills.

On top of that, I’ve had two fellow web developers — Brent Ashley and fellow WordPress developer Alex King — send some contract work references my way (thanks, guys!). Plus, I’m still working on my current contract job. That said, I’d better get back to working our our bills…

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Matt has now taken another step in his quest for world domination. Congrats!

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It’s scheduled for the middle of next week. They’ve asked me to provide all sorts of examples of my work (flowcharts, object diagrams, server-side and client-side programming examples, etc.), so I’m going to be pretty busy getting my materials together over the next few days. Keep your fingers crossed!

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They broke the interview into sections. The first few questions were oriented towards project management in general. How would I go about starting a project, what kind of documents would I use, what are the benefits of using a source control system, etc. The second part was technical questions. What are the methods used for HTML forms and what are the differences between them, what are sessions, and how would I implement them, what are indexes in a database. The technical questions were really pretty simple, and I feel like I answered them pretty well, giving examples of how I had used each technology in the past.

They told me that they would be giving callbacks later this week to the candidates chosen to move on to the next level of the interview process. I’m hoping to hear back. I don’t look forward to having to fight Atlanta traffic, but I think I would enjoy the work there. It sounds a lot like the kind of work I was doing in my previous job. Plus, working at a University would give me a better opportunity to finally finish up my bachelor’s degree.

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• My wife and kids have already relocated to Georgia, but I’m still in Alabama, finishing out my employment here. I’m temporarily living with my brother-in-law. He lives too far from the main part of town to get broadband, so I haven’t been online much in the evenings. And I stay too busy at work trying to finish up projects and documentation to be able to spare time for posts from the office.
• Since the time that I posted about looking for a job, I had an interview, and I’ve been hired for some contract work. I signed an NDA, so I can’t give any real details. I can say that I’ll be working on a web version of an upcoming software application. I’m joining the ranks of independent consultants, which is kind of scary. But the guy I’ll be working for seems to have a pretty good track record, and the project has great potential, so I feel like it’s worth the risk.
• I’ve also just gotten another job lead, via LinkedIn (when it rains, it pours — I’m not complaining ). I haven’t had an actual interview yet (just exchanged a couple of informal emails), so obviously I can’t say a whole lot about that yet, either. However, I will note that my work on WordPress is one of the things that the company finds useful, because their project may involve building a CMS.
• At my current job, I’m scrambling to document processes and train my backup person before I leave. I’ve never enjoyed writing documentation. I’m better at explaining things orally and by example. It’s like my brain stores things in some sort of three-dimensional space, with related subjects connected in a complex mesh by invisible wires, and there’s no easy way to bring information from different parts of that space into a simple linear organization.

There’s more, but those are the major highlights. I’ve been too busy to do anything at all with WordPress over the past few weeks. However, I did finally make time to track down and fix an issue with Ping-O-Matic earlier today. Oh, and did I mention that Ping-O-Matic passed the 1 Million Pings milestone recently?

By this time next week, I should be moved to Georgia with the rest of my family again. Since I’ll be working from home, I’m going to have to make a concentrated effort to be more organized than usual. I’m hoping that this will have the side-effect of giving me more time to work on my open-source efforts, and some other projects of mine that have been sitting on the sidelines for a while.

I’m also hoping that I can make time to start up some sort of semi-regular exercise regimen. Since I’m still in Alabama, and my scale is in Georgia (and I’m not quite sure exactly where it ended up in the new house), I haven’t kept up with my weekly weight measurements. But I feel pretty sure that I’ve picked back up some of the pounds that I had lost before. :-/

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