log.joshuablount.com

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

I was recently driving a friend to the airport when I received a call from a number that wasn’t in my iPhone’s contact list. Generally speaking I would ignore the call, but I thought it might be someone I had met recently, so I picked it up. Here’s a reasonably accurate transcript of the conversation:

“Hi, This is ***** from Robert Half Technology, ”
“Is this a headhunting call”
“Well, yes it is”
“I’m sorry, I’m very happily employed.”
*click*

This wouldn’t be so frustrating if I didn’t get (at least) 3 calls from recruiters a day, but I do. I understand that finding smart people to do geeky things is difficult, but what I don’t understand is why recruiters, and recruitment companies, this this is the best way to go about finding solid employees.

Kyle Neath has a writeup about some of his thoughts on recruitment that you may want to check out. My advice? Find a way to be interesting and please don’t waste my time.

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

The world’s supply of brilliant-the-first-time designers and can-figure-anything-out engineers is not nearly vast enough. While the ranks of folks who think they’re the former is exponentially higher than the folks who think they’re the latter. As an industry where the two sides are so co-dependent on each other, that either group would think of the other’s role as trivial is beyond ridiculous.

- Jack Shedd’s article Divide

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Given my recent job acquisition, I’ll be spending quite a bit of my working hours booting into the Ubuntu Linux distribution directly. I don’t think I’ll be leaving OS X behind completely (need to keep my iPhone full of recent podcasts!), but I thought I would document the things that I’m already missing about using OSX.

• Campfire Theme for Colloquy - At Canonical, we spend quite a bit of our time sorting things out and having meetings via IRC. On a Mac, my preferred IRC client is Colloquy, specifically because of the Campfire based theme that Phillip Toland put together pointed out to me via his blog post.
• Safari 3 - For my money, the best web browsing experience on any platform is Safari 3. It’s got great memory management, Webkit is a fantastic rendering engine, and the interface is simple and non invasive. 
• Twitterific - More and more, Twitter is becoming the place that I go for recent news and events. I knew before the radio or television told me that Bernie Mac had passed away, not to mention getting the heads-up on the new iPhone firmware so that I could start my laborious download process. Twitterific on the mac absolutely nails the twitter experience for me, because when I bring my attention back to the app, it has stored all the tweets since I last focused on it in easy to parse format. The favorite -ing and link out shortcuts are just icing on that already delicious cake. 
• Interface consistency - It’s a hard thing to detail, but I know that in any Mac app, when I do a Command + Comma, I get the preferences page for that app and that’s just not something I’ve found on the Gnome desktop. I’m unsure if that is because of the differences between apps built in / for GTK, or if it’s more-so a result of the independent Mac community being so devoted to the Apple / Mac OS HIG. 

I know this may come across as whining, but there are plenty of things I prefer about the Ubuntu / Gnome / Linux desktop over the Mac OS X Desktop. I’ll revisit these things in another post.

I also understand that the open source community expects me to put my time into the places I’m complaining about, so rest assured that I’ve already begun a bit of work on a revised default theme option for Ubuntu that I plan to have ready sometime a bit later this year.

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

As you almost certainly already know if you know me personally, I’ve recently accepted a position with Canonical Ltd. caretakers of such wonderful open source projects as Ubuntu (Linux for human beings) as well as Bazaar (Version control for human beings). You may be sensing a theme here, but I’m excited to be working for a company focused on changing the world for human beings.

I’ll be doing some usability and interface work, along with front end development, and maybe, just maybe a bit of python while I’m at it. I’m working with an internal team dubbed “Online Services” which sounds a bit generic, but trust me when I say the team itself is remarkable.

I fear that I don’t have a complete understanding of the product we’re actually going to build, but suffice it to say that I’m both incredibly excited, and I also think that you might just be using the software some day.

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Jesus told them, “A prophet has little honor in his hometown, among his relatives, on the streets he played in as a child.” - Mark Chapter 6 and verse 4 

It is truly amazing to me to find the complete lack of interest and excitement in web development in Lake County, Florida. I’ve been working on my own, shelling my skills for cash as Inseasonout, Inc and I haven’t been able to attack even one local client. 

I don’t think this speaks to my abilities as a sales person because I’ve done fine outside of the county (In just the past two weeks I’ve worked with people from California, North Carolina, an Australian in Hong Kong, as well as a few companies in the United Kingdom).

While my current hourly rate of $55 / hour is relatively high for a one man show (If I were somehow able to work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks this year at that rate I would be earning $114k this year, of course taking into account vacation weeks, sales, and business costs / taxes, a more realistic estimate puts me right around $60k a much more reasonable salary) I really feel like I provide a lot of value at my rate, and I’ve been consistently able to find clients that agree with me. 

Any thoughts? Is the “rural” sense of the county what’s fighting against me? Have I not been as aggressive as I should have been in sales? I know there are businesses here that need my skills, but how can I better convince them of that?

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

I’ve been spending quite a bit of my time in the past few days talking to employers, interviewing, etc, and I’ve come to a bit of a crossroad. I could go to work for any number of fine companies that have extended offers to me, and I’d be lucky to work for any one of them. 

But I’m not going to. I’ve re-launched Inseasonout, I’ve gotten incorporated, and I’m continuing to book new work. It’s become readily apparent that I need to start building my own legacy, and it’s not going to be easy building for someone else, or someone else’s company. 

Here goes nothing.

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008