New job: DreamSocket!

At the beginning of March, I was laid off, along with a few hundred others, from Playdom/Disney Interactive. Due to a very generous severance package, I was able to, and in a very real sense, was required to, take a 60 day sabbatical. (Think of it as a paid vacation with full benefits.) No complaints there. I had a great time. But like all good things, it came to an end. Not that I mind working, not at all, but if I could find someone to pay me to do whatever I want for the rest of my life, I’d jump on it. I guess that’s called retirement. If so, I’m looking forward to it.

But anyway, time to move on and get back to work. While I was off, I explored several opportunities. I even went through some interview processes at some big name companies. None of those panned out, but in the long run I’m glad. I don’t think I’m a large company kind of guy. All those HR processes and red tape and forms for this, forms for that, etc. rub me the wrong way. And being a small cog in a large machine, handling some small details of some large application that someone else built years ago, is, to me, about the most mind numbing thing in the world. This was most of the work I did at Playdom. Not all, but a good deal of it. So I’m not sure why I was applying to other large companies.

Actually, I was looking into tech writer / dev support / evangelist positions for a while. But as I started actually looking for and applying for jobs, it became obvious to me that I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do in that field. Some of the developer support positions wound up being more in the realm of tech support call center things. Nope. The tech writer jobs seemed to be largely writing API docs. Hmm… Not exactly creative either. So all in all, it’s most definitely better that none of those things worked out.

What did work out was that I was contacted by Kenny Bunch, a name I’ve known for ages, back from the old Flash community days, but not sure we ever met in person. Kenny started up a company called DreamSocket years back, at first doing lots of Flash stuff, but now mainly native mobile and web apps. We talked a lot and I was really impressed with the work they are doing and got a glimpse into some of the technology they’d developed to do things and was even more impressed. It’s a small company and one of the big draws was that the dev teams are usually a single dev or maybe a couple. In other words, I could own a project from start to finish, not just bang on Jira tickets from some massive code base that I barely understand. So after a few conversations, I got and accepted an offer and started last week.

So far, I’m honestly very excited and happy to be working here. There was a certain prestige about working at Disney – working for the Mouse – but that wears off really quickly when the work itself is not satisfying. What I’m doing now, even in the first week, is really fun. I’ve finally got a reason to buckle down and do real native Android dev. And eventually brush back up on iOS and Objective-C, though it’s only been about a year or so since I did much with that. And there will be some real web work as well. I’m not going to bash Flash, but if I never have to work with the mobile AIR publishing process again, I’ll be perfectly happy.

I’ll still be working remotely, which is nice as well. At least I’ll be on an east coast schedule. Working at Playdom, I adopted a mostly west coast schedule. I’d start working around 11:30 a.m. and go to around 7:30 p.m. Having the mornings was nice, but I also just got lazy and often accomplished nothing in the mornings. I think I’m happier being back on a tight morning schedule. I get up at 6:00 a.m., go for a run, come back, eat, walk the dog, take a shower and start work by 9:00 a.m. And I’m done in time to have dinner with my family, not at my desk.