September 10, 2005
New Design, New Site, New Me
I try to keep my personal entries to a minimum, but so much has been happening lately that I need to ramble a bit. The last 3 months of my life have been an emotional rollercoaster, but things are finally starting to settle down and I'm ready to move on into the next phase of my life.
As you may be aware, I had moved from the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania to Baltimore, Maryland late last year. I scored a really awesome job doing Flash development full time, working on a very large Rich Internet Application in the Health Care industry. Over time, we transitioned the application from Flash to Flex as it was a better fit for the project and we were able to make progress a lot faster. Thus, the basis for my "From Flash to Flex" presentation.
Anyway, things had been going well. In fact, in June I married my long-time sweetheart Jen and we spent 10 wonderful days in Jamaica. After the honeymoon, things started to get crazy. Jen had just graduated from college (with two degrees, in Mathematics and Computer Science). She started a job, but it turns out the job wasn't what she interviewed for and just wasn't right career-wise. So, she quit to pursue a different line of interest. In the meantime, I found out that my company just lost a hostile takeover battle that it was fighting for a over year. Layoffs were inevitable, a few weeks away.
Having a very unstable job situation and feeling the pressure, we started looking around for options. After a few weeks of searching, Jen was able to find a job in central Pennsylvania that was much more suited for her career-wise. I worked out a deal with my manager to work remotely and we packed our belongings and headed for Hershey, Pa.
Moving in and of itself is a stressful process, but moving and not having job security is rough. Thankfully, after Jen started work she found what she was doing to be enjoyable. I worked a few weeks from home, but as soon as the takeover deal was complete I was laid off from work. It was expected, and thankfully I had a good severance package as that gave me time to organize my thoughts and plan my future better.
I've been laid off for a few weeks now, and now that I think I've tied all of the loose ends, I'm ready to move on. Rather than try to find a full-time job in the area, I've decided to take a risk and pursue a full-time contracting career.
I've updated my website to reflect the change (and based the design on tictac). Thankfully, things seem to be off to a good start as I already have work lined up starting next week. I'm not sure how long the duration is ("indefinite, long-term potential"), but I'm excited to try something new and I'm curious to see where life is going to take me.
And of course, I'm going to try and remain a major contributor to IFBIN. IFBIN is a solution providing great software examples for learning and reuse. I've added quite a bit of code to Flash by Example thus far, and I'll be continuing to add more especially now that my time has opened up.
So, here's to the new me! I'm excited / terrified at the same time, but I think things will work out alright... If anyone has any tips about doing contract work full-time, I'd appreciate the insight. Comments welcome. :-)
Also, I only had IE6 and FireFox on Windows XP to test the new site design. Everything should be alright on OS X, but I don't have a copy around to test on. I'm mainly concerned about Safari, as FireFox should render correctly. If you encounter anything goofy, just let me know. You can use my sweet new contact form to get in touch with me.
Comments
Wow, that doesn't sound like it was very fun...
Best of luck in the months to come.
Posted by: P.J. Onori at September 10, 2005 11:50 AM
in firefox pc there is a space at the top before your site header starts and a little ' (unclosed single quote) character is centred there - upon viewing the source it would also seem you have some funky whitespace - your doctype is very far from the top of the page and this will be making ie render in quirks mode rather than strict.
Just spotted the rogue quote to, it's after your 'link' tag with the 'rel' of 'start':
link rel="start"
Posted by: Jon B at September 10, 2005 12:18 PM
also got an error while posting that comment - something to do with a unterminated sprintf or something if it appears again I'll copy it for you:
MT::App::Comments=HASH(0x173e850) Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at d:\inetpub\darronschall\cgi-bin\lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 1187.
Posted by: Jon B at September 10, 2005 12:20 PM
finally, ok just a further bit of info for you - I came via your permalink for this post http://www.darronschall.com/weblog/archives/000184.cfm
The unclosed quote doesn'tapper on other site pages, only the permalink/archive post pages (as reached via your feed)
Posted by: Jon B at September 10, 2005 12:25 PM
Thanks for the input Jon. I've fixed the ' thing. The whitespace issue is related to ColdFusion and my templating system, I'll look into that as well. Not sure about the comment posting error, that sounds like a movable type thing?
Posted by: darron at September 10, 2005 12:41 PM
*waits impatiently*
Posted by: nig at September 10, 2005 02:02 PM
Hey man,
I totally understand what you’re going through. When my wife and I first moved back to California I didn't really have a job. I did have a few good offers on the table but I hadn't accepted anything and wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I jumped around from place to place trying to find a fit and after working at Blitz I decided to go full time contracting.
I did that for almost 6 months and it was really cool; made my own hours, I could pick and choose the projects I worked on and I got to work with a lot of different people and processes that I would not have had the chance to otherwise.
The one thing I didn’t like was that work would come in waves. Sometimes I’d have to do 3-4 projects simultaneously because I didn’t have any work lined up for the following month or other times all my time would be consumed by just 1 project. I think the hardest part for me was learning the type of projects to take and having to fire clients. Because I’m very optimistic I tend to see the best in the project and in the people. However, sometimes there are those projects that are just bad due to lack of management, vision or motivation and those are the types of projects and clients that end up wasting your time. I remember I turned down work for 2 weeks (which is a lot when it’s you sole source of income) waiting on this client because they kept promising me this project would come through (it never did). It happens though and I never took anything personally.
I’m going to stop here now that I’ve got a place in the Guinness book of world records for the longest comment ever. I hope you’re able to take some value out of this and I wish you all the best on your new chapter in life but I know you’re going to do fantastic!
On a side note, I may have a project for you if you’re interested ping me off list.
-erik
Posted by: erikbianchi at September 10, 2005 05:19 PM
Darron,
The changes to the site look great! Works perfectly for me in OS X 10.4.2 with latest Safari, I'll compare to Firefox and let you know if I notice anything strange. It's a really clean design and very functional. I'm jealous, my site is a hodgepodge of patches and junk that has accumulated over the years, think yours is spot on. Best of luck with everything!
For anyone else reading these comment's, I totally vouch for Darron's skills, quality of work and professionalism from firsthand experience. He is also a great presenter who comes totally prepared. If your thinking about hiring a contractor or outside developer, look no further, Darron is your man.
Posted by: Rob at September 10, 2005 06:24 PM
Hey Darron! All the best for your new role as Freelance developer. Hope things will work out well...
Have been following your blog for a while and the new look is great!
Posted by: aj at September 11, 2005 08:06 AM
Good luck to you both. No matter where u are it seems, life is still very hard as a startup :)
Posted by: cosmin at September 12, 2005 01:53 AM
Congrats on going off on your own Darron. Definitely a bold move, and one I think you will have NO problems succeeding at. Also congrats on the wedding.
Posted by: Josh Dura at September 12, 2005 09:56 AM
Hey Darron, it looks as though the fonts for your calendar are a bit to big for the column width--I'm looking at the site with Firefox 1.6 on XP. Also, After hitting preview in the comments section, a text area with an error appears in the middle of the comment form. Other than that, things look great. Best of luck with the contracting.
Posted by: Brooks Andrus at September 13, 2005 02:36 AM
Thanks Brooks. It turns out the error in the comment form is a known issue with my version of MovableType ( see: http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=8&t=33876 ). I've applied a small patch to correct it...
Posted by: darron at September 13, 2005 07:36 AM
I couldn't agree more.
Posted by: Sean at October 30, 2005 06:40 AM