Ian Battersby
What a fantastic ride the last 2.5 years have been since setting myself up as an independent consultant and contractor despite the recession business has not only prospered but grown from strength to strength, especially in terms of opportunities to work with new technology.
Did we pass GO without noticing?
I confess to being so busy both 'catching up' and 'keeping up' with technological developments that I now wonder if I somehow missed a turning point in the willingness of the commercial sector to embrace new technologies, especially those emanating from the OSS stable.
Three years ago I found myself struggling to push through the most trivial design decisions such as using a home-baked build provider or using SQL Server 2005 notification services; however mention the words NHibernate, StructureMap, MVC, NUnit or Moq and you have people salivating at the prospect.
This newfound openness is not limited to technologies either; the attractiveness to both employer and employee of adopting methodologies like Scrum, and development practices such as DDD (Domain Driven Design), is palpable.
Along came Polly
Golden opportunities don't often come along but I was fortunate to find myself contracting with a company based in Oxfordshire who were about the embark on a massive migration to .NET, more excitingly their Technical Lead Rob Ashton was an avid support and contributor to OSS.
Nine months later we are nearing completion of the company's flagship product. It has been without doubt the most enjoyable and challenging chapter of my development career, thanks to both the exciting technologies employed, and the freedom to truly innovate and push the envelope.
You're leaving!?
With an extremely sad heart I will soon be leaving Rob %2B Co to explore new horizons; the simple truth being that I would love to stay and continue work on the product to maturity but have been unable to negotiate satisfactory contract terms.
I take away a fantastic experience that has improved my abilities ten-fold and given me the opportunity to push my game to a whole new level; not to mention a formidable adversary in Rob when debating source control ;-)
What now?
I'm currently looking at several different opportunities but in the meantime will be focusing back on developing my in-house BizSpark project 'Indigo' together with an OSS project named 'Dionysus', both of which are Microsoft MVC2 and VS2010.
Oh, and catching up on some sleep too! :)
We love you OSS!
The hard work and contributions of those in the open-source community is invaluable and something too often overlooked. I can't thank enough those who create and support such amazing innovative software, and even more impressively put up with my late night tempered grumbles on twitter and come to my aid.
You are simply amazing, thank you!