A Year of Whatever

It’s been a bit over a year since I was laid off from Etsy, where I’d been for 11½ years. Although everyone will tell you not to take a layoff personally, it still stings knowing that someone decided you were not worth keeping around. That said, the layoffs seemed to hit old-timers and remotes particularly hard, so the deck was stacked against me.

It wasn’t hard for me to decide not to go looking for another full-time job. I’d long fantasized about being an indie software developer, working on my own things and setting my own schedule, so I guess that’s what I was now.

I started an LLC for all the amazing apps I was going to start writing, but then some consulting fell into my lap. (Coincidentally, this same thing happened to me the last time I was laid off, nearly 25 years ago. I had been working in San Francisco during the dot-com boom and when the company went under I was all set to move to Bishop and become a climbing bum for a year, when a friend pinged me and I ended up spending the next four years consulting.)

I spent a couple months with Wikimedia Foundation creating data modeling guidelines. I learned that WMF has some really interesting and unique challenges, both technically and politically. It’s a really great group of folks.

That was followed a by a much bigger consulting opportunity, which lead to starting another LLC with some friends. We spend about six months tackling a pretty hairy data engineering challenge. What I learned from that is if you see NetSuite, run.

Around the paid gigs I also spent some time helping out one friend with their startup, another with his app, and wrote a web app to help another friend give away free bikes to kids.

I’ve been keeping myself pretty busy since that last gig ended. I spent a good amount of time doing a deep dive into MacOS aerial screensavers/wallpapers. I wrote a Safari extension to redact news articles. I wrote a little web game. I also spent a good amount of December doing Advent of Code, working on my Swift and SwiftUI skills in the process.

I’ll write separate posts about all of those projects, but I’m currently mulling over what to do next. I recently got a 3D printer, so playing with that and learning a bit of CAD has been taking a lot of my time, but that’s not nearly as fulfilling as a good project is.

So after a year of being “indie,” I’m still pretty sure I’m never going back to a full-time jobby-job. I do miss my colleagues at Etsy, and there’s something to be said about being part of a team and a larger mission, but I do not miss all the overhead that comes with working at a “large” company (“work about work”). I love waking up every day knowing that I have zero meetings and what I want to accomplish that day is entirely up to me. Literally whatever.

Now to just come up with that killer app idea….