A Software Journeyman's guide to being jobless and homeless

@robashton

So you want to be a programmer?

Why?

To make games?

To make people happy?

To make millions of dollars?

So where did we end up?

Obligatory Audience Participation Time

Everybody stand up

Sit down if....

You work too much

You have too many meetings

(definition: meeting) - A practical alternative to work

You don't feel as if you're learning anything

You're planning on quitting in the next six months

don't be shy now ;-)

You're bored at work a lot

Those that are left....

Where do you work?

Are you hiring? ;)

My story

The year was 2012

I was working for one of those companies

I was so good at programming that...

I was asked not to code any more

I was doing....

50% meetings
20% politics
30% managing a team
0% building software

So one day....

I rage quit

I left the country

I threw away most of my belongings

I blogged

"I am not looking for a job"

My offer

You pay to get me to your location

You find me somewhere to live

I will work on anything you want for free

My rules

Rule #1 - If it's not on my calendar, it isn't happening

Rule #2 - First come first served - make a decision

Rule #3 - I'll bend the rules if you're somewhere warm and sunny

My goals

Build cool stuff

To make new friends

Get a sun-tan

Thus began a journey

ALL THE PLACES

The outer hebrides

A Lithuanian Wedding

Greece

Israel

Hawaii

San Francisco

Eurovision

France

Joined a start-up

Quit a start-up

Learning Clojure

What did I learn?

A year compressed into 45 minutes

Come see me after if you want to

hear the more lurid details ;)

Lesson one - Coping with Failure

Failure...

Risk mitigation

Driving slowly due to adverse conditions
Wearing a seat-belt
Paid up-front to remove the insurance excess

Moving on

"Can I have a new car please?"

Car crash software

Most software mistakes aren't as bad as a car crash...

So why do we end up afraid of making mistakes?

Blame culture
Fear of failure
Fear of the cost

Tests are a good seatbelt

Short iterations make for a good insurance policy

Responding to failure with "what's next?"

Lesson two - It's not the Platform

The .NET Framework

"I just don't know what went wrong"

A tale of two clients

Working for Ayende Rahien

Working for Truthvine

We shipped a lot of code

We shipped a start-up

We wrote all the features for a major release of RavenDB

We delivered

.NET was never the problem

The problems were?

Bad tooling

Low trust enviroments

Bad management practises

Poor shipping mentality

In other words......

Enterprise!!

Lesson three - Learning is possible

The agile Greeks

"I've no idea who you are"

But an extra pair of hands wouldn't hurt

IN THE CALENDAR WE GO

Oh you're getting on a plane?

Do you know what we do?

You might want to read this PHD thesis

Confronted with a challenge

PathSegment = 
      '/'
      ResourceName:resource
      (
        ("(" Number:key ")")?
        (
          (seq("/$links") PathSegment:link)
        | PathSegment: next
        )?
      ) -> { resource: resource, key: key, link: link, property: next }
,

9 days to ship a feature in an esoteric language?

A breakdown of time spent

20% staring at a screen feeling stupid
20% in a rum bar weeping into my glass
5% writing a "hello world" learning exercise
30% days flinging code manically
25% writing blog entries about this