Technical Ramblings

As of today, I am no longer a salaried employee of wedü. It’s been a great ride, which has taught me a lot on everything from PHP to dealing with clients, and I hope that we can maintain a relationship as I move forward in my work. Sadly, the move to Cambridge made a commute very nearly impossible for my lifestyle, so staying on as a full time employee was simply not an option.

Currently, I am working as a freelance web developer. This entails a number of things, of course: someone who writes Javascript for inclusion in ASP pages can call themselves a developer. (I’d prefer to call them a demon from the underworld, but that’s just me.) My specific experience is mostly in relatively small-scale PHP/MySQL applications, geared towards self-maintainability. This includes the development of tools to allow users to maintain their own web sites: posting news listings, uploading images, and the like. Wedü taught me many things about the value of these tools to users and clients.

In any case, I am now out on my own. I’m currently involved in several projects, but even with that, I will be afforded much more free time, as a result of less time commuting. The Cambridge commute had me spending more hours at work simply to avoid traffic, and I’m glad to be rid of it. It’s possible that I may take some more time to work on my own projects now (assuming I can pay the bills and health insurance in other ways), since I’m setting my own schedule, it’s possible that I can include some time for “self promotion” in my schedule.

I don’t think I’ll be falling back into the RDF circle anytime soon. As I said before, too much evangelism is necesary: I’m tired of fighting the same fights over and over. It’s disapointing to see some uptake for battles I tried to fight just as I was stepping out of the way, but even my frustrations with that are not enough to drag me back into the fold.

I am going to be looking to make contact with any number of people who are looking to have websites developed, however. I have contacts with a design firm, and they are willing to work with me to improve on my atrocious design skills, leading to the development of better websites. I have knowledge of a wide array of technologies. I have a full profile of skills available under my Formal Works, and I will soon be redesigning my website to be more informative about my technical skills and experiences.

If you, or someone you know, is looking to hire a web developer or designer for work on either a new website or modifying an existing site, please get in touch. I have a rather impressive set of skills to bring to bear on most issues (at least compared to some other web developers that I’ve spoken to) and although my formal experience may not show it, I have the ability to get anything you want done.

Christopher Schmidt, Freelance Web Developer, is on the prowl.

On Thursday night, I attended the first meeting of what looks to become a great group of people, at the first PySig meeting, in Manchester, NH. The meeting release has some more information on it, and the mailing list is a great place for discussion of it for people who may be interested.

It was interesting to speak to a mixture of people ranking from 20 years in the computer industry to people like me with one or two, and note that they were all interested in learning Python – and that I definitely had a thing or two up on most of them in this day and age. For example, in a room of 20 participants, several of whom have been working with Python for years, I was the only person who had actually had work posted to Daily Python URL.

During the meeting, I wrote some code (a clunky registration page) which we then did some initial code review on. I demonstrated a trick I learned from sbp, including a “View Source” part of my application so people could see exactly what it was doing.

I’m falling back in love with Python quite quickly. This is nice for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the start of a bit more free time as of this week. I’ll explain that in a later post.

Mostly, I’d like to put out the word to anyone that attended that I had a great time, and I’d love to see more people in the area attend. So far as I can find, there is no group of people in the Northeast that has as much coverage as the pysig.org website: there’s been a couple postings around Boston, but nothing big enough that they have a website. I’d be glad to find out I’m wrong, however, so feel free to tell me so. 🙂