Consulting

I recently moved into consulting, after a few comfortable and enjoyable years developing software for an internet service provider.

I'm enjoying it a lot. It's not the money (I've seen more of that than I used to make, but I've also moved to where things are more expensive, so things even out). Rather, it's the fact that I work with many different technologies, so I get to learn more as I work.

Lately, I've been learning postgresql functions and triggers in plpgsql. I went back to something I used to do all the time, code generation. I wrote a multi-threaded program in C/C++ and learned the benefits of STL at the same time. Of course I already knew what the STL could give me, I just hadn't actually experienced the benefits yet.

After using STL for a few days, I dropped my handcrafted string and container classes.

Doxygen is great and I'll be getting into PHP+SOAP (it should really be java+SOAP or something similar, but I need quick wins, like results within a week, and java is too complicated for that kind of thing, maybe on my next project I'll work with java).

One thing about consulting is, there's always something different happening, so burnout due to boredom won't happen. Although burnout due to stress is always a possibility :). But then I can usually set my own schedule, so that's *less* likely than it seems.