I have recently started looking for my next contract/perm place of work. After spending my last contract in a place that was really great, it is hard to see where I will move on to next.

I was working with some pretty cool people like Zohar, Ian, and other really great people.

My manager had a clue, and his boss was great as well. The project was using new technologies, and as a team there was an attitude of trying to improve our processes and ways of working to get things done better. Moving to XP was a great experience.

All round it was a great gig, and I am sorry they couldn’t all come to Australia and work from here :).

Waking up to a blue sky every morning for the past month has made up for missing the great place of work. Not having to be in the Tube, and not hearing about peoples commutes into work is also nice.

The hard part is sorting out what I will do next. It’s a bit of a mini career crisis…..

I think that as far as being a senior Developer I have pretty much had the peak experience in a internal project team. It doesn’t really get much better than the team I was just on (thanks guys).

I am looking at my options, thinking that I am not really keen to do the same old thing building data capture applications for people. As interesting as that can be, at the end of the day, it’s not rocket science, no matter what people might think. The idea of getting together with some really good people in new technology, something interesting is really pretty interesting. The other thought that has some appeal is the idea of doing further study, and picking up a PhD.

Happily I am in a position where money doesn’t have to be an immediate concern. I want to find some work that is challenging, and interesting. I have a mixture of idealism and pragmatism in my approach to life, and so would ideally like a job where I could make the world a better place, but release that at the end of the day, it is just software :).

The other constraint that limits me somewhat is that I think Brisbane is one of the best places in the world, and relocation isn’t an option at the moment. It is true that this limits my potental earnings, and the pool of available jobs is more limited than it would be elsewhere, but there is much more to life than just work. (although being happy at work does help make the rest of life better).

I think I am going to take it easy and see if some of the companies doing interesting stuff in Brisbane, or with other cool stuff end up hiring, or if the weightlifters end up looking. Either that or until someone wants to pay me enough money to contract, or do something interesting.

I have been around for long enough to have people wanting to get things going so if that happens before any of the others I will be able to jump in :).

It will be interesting to see what happens next, and if the good things from my past will work out again.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2004 at 12:17 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.