I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I’ve held back because
- It doesn’t feel completely real in some ways and
- I’m under NDA and don’t want to say too much
It’s a Java job, working with Nutch, Lucene and Solr. It’s a one person start-up, and the owner has expectations that she’ll need a Chief Technical Officer soon, so this contract I’m doing is sort of an audition for the CTO job. She has an existing code base that she paid a consulting company to write, but she has a long list of things she needs done to it, and I’m making my own list as I go along. (Unit tests and fixing the things FindBugs finds tops my list, but so is fixing the horribly manual deployment process.) The current contract is fixed price, but I should be able to do it quickly enough to make it a decent hourly wage. I’m currently working on my own at home, but she’s going to have a two person office in a week or so at a local technology incubator. I told her that as long as it has wifi, a big whiteboard and access to a fridge, I’d be happy. As an added bonus, the technology incubator is pretty close to where Vicki works, so we’ll be able to meet for lunch or go to the gym together.
Because I’m working on my own, but expecting to work with others in the future, the first thing I did with her existing source code was to put it into “git”. (Maybe it’s because git isn’t as obtrusive as something like ClearCase where you have to check things out, I haven’t found any decent Eclipse plug-ins for git.) As well as learning git, nutch, lucene and solr (not to mention the technologies they depend on, like Hadoop), I’m also learning a bit about making a build environment in ant.
All in all, it’s fun and interesting work, and whether the company fizzles out or grows to a hundred employees, it’s going to be a great learning and growth opportunity for me. And hell, even if it sucked as much as my last job (which it doesn’t) it would be better than unemployment.