Something magical happened today.
I finalized my leave from my full-time position at NCSA. And how it happened was very offhand. I thought that I told my boss this late last year, but I guess at that time, I wasn’t very sure either. As a sidenote, it’s going to be weird writing a letter of resignation so far in advance.
It’s been on my mind for months, as to where I should go next after my lease runs out. Do I stay, or do I find somewhere else to be awesome in? I’ve also been toying with half-time, but found out even more how bad of an idea that is. (The vacation day payout at the end gets silly, and I won’t have any of that.)
So yeah, that’s it. I’ve been telling friends that this might happen, but now you all know: It is happening.
Why “Quitting” Is In Quotes
I’m quitting my full-time job, but I’m far from quitting anything else.
What the heck am I doing after August? Well, I hope to scrimp and save like a madman up until that point, making sure to at least leave with +$10K in the bizzank. I hope that the next step will be a bit clearer to me as I continue the good work.
How It Began
Just so everyone’s on the same page: I went to college here. After graduating, I did some freelancing while staying in town for a couple more months. Eventually, went home to Cincinnati, because there was very little reason to stay in town. Thankfully, I was hired by a web development firm up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After only about six weeks of being in that job, I got an offer from NCSA (I applied well in advance of the job in Minneapolis) and rolled back down here.
The perk that helped me make that decision was simple: the chance for an all-paid for MBA. I was fairly certain I wanted to go back to school. Of course, I wised up and asked myself why I would endure the same pain and suffering from not being able to do, even though it was free? (And no, I’m not knocking on anyone else who got an MBA. I just don’t feel like it would be of use to me. Who knows, maybe it’ll come bite me in the butt later.)
So with that, I decided that I needed to continue my efforts in making HanMeta a reality. Of course, that was started in Decmeber 2007 on paper, but it started back around when I graduated. I don’t think I really understood even the ramifications of the possibility of running a company. I think I just liked to go around telling people that I had a company.
And Now…
Well, it’s go time now. This year started off with quite the bang, learning more linux admin than I could handle (I mean this because I’m probably going to be outsourcing the infrastructure of whatever I write to Heroku), refocusing on what I want to do with the blog, and relearning Rails from the ground up.
With the acceptance to the Apple iPhone Developer Program (and with my $105.19, blah), I’m ready to do some coding for that platform also. I know that the iPhone platform fits into what I want to do, it’s just a question of what I want to do on it. Do I want to make a quick helpful app to fund the rest of HanMeta? I don’t know.
And as I continue my work at NCSA, I hope to hone the skillset I have now. I’m currently working with two other awesome developers (one of which who was a little too happy for me to quit 
NCSA’s getting hit with budget constraints, too, it seems, and I was more than happy that my move to quit was going to help someone else out in the process.) with our insane code update process, with a specific focus on the UI (the HTML/CSS/JavaScript). Finally, I can leave the realm of Sybase and DBArtisan. (If anywhere in the job description you see those two words, run. For me, ColdFusion is on that list, with a few others.)