Moving home (3 of 3)

19 Jul 2004

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On Friday, besides signing for my new abode, I also accepted a job offer at Jam Warehouse and resigned from Independent Online.

Now, IOL's a great place. If you think you have the clue to replace me and live in Cape Town or wish to, my boss would love your CV. Great people and culture, and challenging work environment. I'll probably spend quite a bit of time helping out trying to find a replacement.

(And now all the well-wishers are arriving at my desk. They're so sweet.)

Why would I leave such a dreamy place? Lots of leave time, for one. Well, the Jam position is 12 days a month minimum, although I'll average at least 15. The rest of the time I'll spend trying to figure out what to do with my career. Or just sleep. In any case, it's a great opportunity to start working for myself with a stable base.

I'm going to be working on (and yes, even paid to work on)KnowledgeTree DMS, an Open Source project originally developed by Jam for the South African Medical Research Council. Part of the MRC's requirements was that the software be Open Source. Yay the MRC!

Besides the great leave and working on an Open Source project (in the DMS area, which I'm interested in), the other benefit is being exposed to very experienced developers and a very mature software development process at Jam.

So, I'll be able to learn some formal analysis skills, UML, RUP, and other goodies from people who're already successfully using them in projects, as opposed to it being tacked onto failing projects. All in all, a good opportunity for learning.

With the spare time, I'll try appease some existing clients, catch up on 25 years of missed sleep and heal a few years of information overload, and try explore the world of training and contracting. Oh, and speak at as many conferences as I can get myself into. And maybe finally go to a Python conference.

Now I just have to wait 42(!) days for it all to start.

1 Responses

  1. Neil Blakey-Milner — July 19, 2004 at 03:04 PM.

    Oh, I didn't cover that bit very well. Yes, it's development - new features, some scalability work, and maintenance mostly from what I understand. It's already a working product with a number of installations. But I'm also supposed to do quite a bit more besides that - engage the community, try to garner interest in the project, deal with clients with support contracts, write technical documentation, and more. Quite an opportunity to learn and nurture some nascent skills.

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Hi, I'm Neil Blakey-Milner, a technology generalist most interested by open source, security, and building scalable systems (especially if I get to use the Python programming language).

I "work" at the incredibly fun web-sites-for-everyone startup SynthaSite based in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa.

What I do

  • StarCamp

    I was the main instigator behind this 2-day unconference in December 2007 in Cape Town. There'll be another one in Cape Town around July.

  • GeekDinner

    I help out in making these geek social events happen every two months in Cape Town since March 2007.

  • SynthaSite

    I make sure that the systems run smoothly at this Cape Town-born Web 2.0 startup.

  • Presentations

    I speak publically on a number of topics - generally related to technical aspects of open source software or on software development.

  • Code

    I've written a few software projects of my own over the years (although mostly I'm the only user of them).

  • Photos

    I'm far from an artist, but I enjoy capturing my experiences on camera.

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