Maybe it's the uber-caffiene injection (quad venti no-whip mocha, thankyouverymuch)
mixed with the quick availability of book learnin' - especially since the entrepreneurship
books are damn near always one row over from the coding section - but every time I
hit the Barnes & Noble in Huntersville I get hit with the classic entrepreneurial
seizure.
This happens every time, no matter what my current station in life is. The first
time it happened, I was underemployed, working at Target and Blockbuster to make ends
meet - it was easy to know then that I could do better. Next, I worked for medium-size
tobacco as their sr. developer (thanks to the experience I had with help from
the VS support guys I worked next to at MS during the .Net 1.0 beta days). It
was a job, but I knew that I could do better.
I formed a master plan. I would find a job in NYC as a developer at a big financial,
work there for a few years, and then come back down to Charlotte to work for one of
the banks here. Mission Accomplished.
I got my chance through the good people at E5 Systems to
work for Credit Suisse|First Boston, a large (if not troubled) I-bank in midtown Manhattan.
I was able to join a new development team from the very beginning, and used the ramp-up
time to position myself as the development team's IT guy - getting VSS, NUnit, NCover,
and FXCop (have they gotten around to documenting the introspection API yet? Thanks Reflector!)
to integrate rather nicely inside of VS.Net with the help of a couple add-ins and
deployment scripts I wrote, all humming under the protective umbrella of CruiseControl.Net.
It was a regular Team System 2004 if you ask me - minus the spit n' polish of course.
But, even after working on getting that running, even after spending the months after
that building extensible middle-tier components for templated email, security, and
process - that was a nice change from the repetitive cycle of DB-driven ASP.Net apps
- even after all that, I thought I could do better. But, I had a plan to stick
to, and a wife from Charleston who
was already asking me when we'd be heading back to the “proper” wide of
the Mason-Dixon line.
Well, Wachovia came calling, and here I am now, still a contractor, but doing good
work with good people for the last few weeks. Again, the feeling hit me - I
can do better. I'm not going to start looking for another job - nosir, the pay
rate is right, and I can probably get myself into a 7-4 schedule if I can get my night-owl
butt out of bead early enough.
No, it's time to fire up some new streams of income - how I'm going to do it, I'm
not sure. Step one, I think, will be to establish a presence for myself that's
a little deeper than a blog, but hey - I'd rather have a blog than brochureware.
Step 2 - Well, step 2 is still a little fuzzy. Step 3, naturally, is profit
- although I'd settle for revenue at first. Profit can come later.
Naturally, as this new wave of gumption has come to me, the MSDN Universal subscription
that was bestowed upon me by an old job has run out, leaving me out in the cold -
with VS.NEt 2005 beta 2 (supposedly) a month away! Curses! Well, VWD Express
will do for now, until I can get a copy of Pro beta 2 on a CD or via other means -
even if I can't
change the colors (how did THAT get broken so late in the game?).
Oh - I promise less rambling and more usefulness in the future, or maybe it'll be
up to you (and/or feedster) to pick out the goodness from the cat pictures.
We'll see.
- G
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