heyPanda

Originally posted December 20, 2007 at masonbrowne.info:

Though I promised myself I'd stick to freelancing (due to the freedoms associated with working for myself), it looks like I may be taking a position with a very classy design company.

I've been selectively reaching out to companies and people in an effort to get more consistent work (that is, work with consistent people; if task switching is a pain for developers, team switching is hell). For the most part, the places I've been contacting are in search of contract developers, but none so far have been a good "fit", though surprisingly enough, I've had a few fair offers.

I sort of stumbled Boom, however. I'm currently finishing up some work for omnibus creative. The project is for the Louisiana Public Health Institute, under a campaign they're running called Dirty Habits, and apparently Boom is involved with it somehow. In any case, I was at one point in contact with their lead developer, and decided to see who they were. And what did I see at the top of their homepage but a call for a Rails developer.

So... a few emails and two phone calls later, we're pretty darn close. We just hit the part everybody hates: negotiating pay. In fact, everybody hates it so much, I'll stop that subject there.

It will be interesting working with a company that does design in-house again. I really haven't had that since my days at Zee, and for good reason. While I can whip out some lovely standards-compliant HTML/CSS with little effort, making it look good is a much harder task for me. Just as I've gotten more anal-retentive in my coding practices, it takes a very picky designer to get all those little, yet infinitely important details right. And since most of the people I've worked with feel the same way, I've only been working with people who stick to development and farm out the design work. It's pretty standard procedure these days.

One thing I'm both dreading and rejoicing over is that they appear to do mostly Flash-based sites. I dread it because Flash-only sites are traditionally considered a faux pas in this age of Standards Compliance, yet I rejoice because in past experience, the programmer's job for the front end is to just... spit out XML. And with Rails, that means:

                    @articles = Article.find :all
                    respond_to do |format|
                      format.xml { render :xml => @articles.to_xml}
                    end
                  

Ouch, huh?

The other aspect which draws me to Boom is the people. The company is relatively small in size (though they're partnered with a much larger company, apparently), and I got some really good vibes talking with them. That, and one of them has a wall in their home with a really nice shade of green.

So. If this whole thing goes down the way everyone seems to want it to (I may or may not edit this sentence for clarity later), that will start in January. Until then, I'm just sort of chillin'. LPHI's project is winding down, I leave for Billings on... Sunday(?), and I'm in Seattle from Dec 28th - Jan 5th.

It's now 8:44 am, the earliest I've been up in probably a month... but only because I have yet to go to bed. I figure at this point, it's easier to just continue my (non)sleep pattern until it gets back on track with society, and then adjust it to stasis.