My son, Peter, has been churning out news articles for MacCentral from Appleland, and meanwhile, I’ve been chained to the oar writing my first big commercial Microsoft .NET application.
I attended Macworld a couple of years ago as a vendor, and it was one of my happiest professional experiences. Every year since, I go into a minor depression when the first week of January rolls around – regret that I’m not in San Francisco again with the fiercely independent, eccentric and dazzlingly intellectual Macintosh developer community.
Still, I experienced Macworld as an outsider. Apple may have seduced a good number of Windows users, especially with personal appliance type products like the iPod, but it’s tough to be a developer in both worlds. I own an iBook, but have never invested the time and effort to understand its programming environment.
This January I’ve been too preoccupied to give Macworld much thought, and that’s been a blessing: after a year of doing small projects in Microsoft .NET, my first client, a company I’ve known and liked for over 5 years, gave me my largest assignment to date.
I made a commitment to the project in late fall, knowing that I’d pretty much be putting my life on hold until it was done.
Christmas went by, then New Year’s. Thanks to my good friend Candy and her grown-up children, who invited me to an 8-person killer dominoes match on New Year’s Eve, I did get some down time.
This is not meant to be complaining, steep learning curves are exhilarating, especially when you’ve got a project to work on. But .NET is not the walk in the park that the Microsoft marketing department wants us to believe, especially when you’re a sole practitioner who doesn’t have daily contact with other programmers.
Still, I think this will be worth it. I’ve been getting probably 2-3 emails a week asking if I wanted to bid on other .NET projects.
I hope this will be a good year; my company has suffered since March 2001 when the bottom fell out of tech. In looking at my business plan versus actual results, last year was a disaster until Q4: American programmer, will work for food.
One project I’m very proud of, though, and it was straight JavaScript and HTML running on a UNIX server. It was a commission for a small Lower Cape art gallery. I helped the owner’s wife restructure their website so that it would be easy for her to maintain. In exchange, the artist made me a beautiful piece of stained glass which hangs in my living room window.
Well, none of us lives by bread alone.