Hire me!

Well, as previously reported, I got caught up in a big layoff from Disney Interactive / Playdom. Considering the amount of time I was there, I got treated pretty well and that has allowed me to take a couple of months off completely. Actually, without getting into details, I kind of can’t start another full time job until early May. But it’s all good. Very good. I’ve been enjoying the time off immensely. I could get used to this. But eventually, the clock will strike midnight, my coach will turn into a pumpkin, I’ll have to leave the ball and go back to scrubbing cinders.

I haven’t been job hunting in earnest, but have had some interesting conversations that I need to follow up on. I guess over the next few weeks I will have to get more serious about this.

I did manage to pick up some contract work. I’ll be creating an online video-based course to teach basic JavaScript. This will be six lessons, each 30-45 minutes of video each. I spent the last week finalizing the outline and getting to work on Lesson 1. I’m really excited about this and I’m having a lot of fun doing it. This is exactly the kind of work that I would love to be doing full time. And it’s a nice extra income that pushes off that pumpkin deadline a few more weeks into the future as well.

I already mentioned this in my previous post about being laid off, but since then I’ve been doing even more “soul searching” about what I want to do and this is it. All recent controversy aside, I’d love to get into someplace like Mozilla, working with the MDN documentation or something similar. Or any other company that has an API, a service, a language, system, framework, etc. that they want people to understand and use to its full potential. I just love learning something, then analyzing the hell out of it in order to teach it to others, showing them A. why they might want to use it, B. how easy it is to use and how to get started, and C. some awesome things you can do with it.

Alternatively, I’d also love to get into something even more purely educational, such as Khan Academy, Udacity, Lynda.com or something like that. That’s basically what I’m doing now with this JavaScript course contract. I’d be happy to continue doing contracts like this, though the illusion of job security with full time employment still has a hold on me.

I’m also not at all averse to continuing on in a straight up developer role somewhere. But if so, I’d love to be somewhere where I could start projects and do some creative work, not just be a member of a large team handling a conveyor belt of Jira tickets on some system created by someone who no longer even works there.

So, I’ll be continuing to do a more traditional job search kind of thing, but figured it couldn’t hurt to throw out a shotgun post like this. If you know of any leads or have any contacts in any companies that might be looking for people in positions like any of the above, please send them my way!