Circling Back
People have asked me quite a lot lately what I’m going to do now that I’m free and clear of Click Here and my pat answer has been one of two or three things:
- Find a product-oriented company with a high-performance team building something amazing, or
- Bootstrap my own tiny consultancy, and / or
- Build an amazing product.
As luck would have it, I’ve already landed an interview at a company that offers the first option. I’m excited about the interview, but realistic about the possibilities. Because they appear to be a high-performance team, they are guarding the entrance quite closely. My level of intrigue is all that much higher because the interview process is anything but easy and normal. Suffice it to say that you can’t get hired by being a good guy and liberally dropping high-impact buzzwords. You may laugh, but I’ve been hired through such good-guy interviews.
This is a position which features the use of Java as their primary implementation language, so my challenge is to get back into the Java mindset after several months of Ruby development. My friend Mike once supposed that I would never return to Java. Its possible he’s wrong as I could be circling back. Working with Ruby is fun, but my talents and experience position we well for a Java shop and there is more of a job market there too.
But even as I say that, I must admit that looking at Java for the first time in a few months has surprised me. Java hasn’t changed, but it seems that my mind has started to think in Ruby. I am actually alarmed that a language I’ve worked in for years could be subject to this kind of transition. I found myself asking fundamental syntax questions. So I wondered if this had happened to anyone else. Or is this just a by-product of my being 43?
Well, I’m not worried about picking Java up again, but I am picking a problem to code to get my head back into it. I still have a series of Java projects from an interview process I went through in June (yes, I was offered the job), so I’m going to work through one of those. To make it more fun, I may try to integrate it into a JRuby on Rails project and do a local deploy. This will enable me to prepare for the interview and explore the integration possibilities for JRuby and Java.
What happens if I don’t get the job? Well, that’s a real possibility, so I’m planning my bootstrapping activities for my consultancy. Having done recent work for a medium-sized consultancy, I know there is work out there and I know that I can provide high-quality work for a portion of the price that bigger companies are charging. But as every entrepreneur knows, you cannot be successful without customers, so my biggest challenge will be to construct a marketing machine capable of producing a sustainable pipeline of work. For technicians, this is not an intrinsic skill, so I’ve been thinking more about marketing than my technical skills — the latter is the easy part.
In some ways this takes me back a great many years ago when I created a small software company, SportSoft Systems, which created and marketed Fantasy Football software and a few other things. This was back 20 years ago and my product was just about the best out there. Had I only known that the fantasy sports craze was to explode, I would have stuck with it. I did actually make decent money, but the pressures of supporting the product and building in new features every year while being an ethical employee at my primary job caused me to discontinue my efforts.
So for now, I’m circling back — either to the Java world or to a world where I build my own company. Should be fun wherever things lead.