My full-time employment is coming to a close, and I am once again rebooting my self-employment life.

From web comic name.

What Happened?

If you’ve been following along with my now updates, it has been clear that my full-time job was not in a great place for a while.

The short story is that when I interviewed and eventually accepted the job, I had a well-considered list of things I was aligned with and looking forward to, including:

• small company / profitable startup
• in-person retreats to support an online/remote team
• opportunities to be involved in the product design work
• dedicated tech debt time
• weekly team educational events

Six weeks after joining, a large corporation acquired us; six months after, a private equity firm acquired that public corporation.

Suffice it to say, the things I was looking forward to never materialized. I stuck it out as long as I could but decided it was time to move on. “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

What’s Next?

Instead of looking for a replacement full-time gig, I am once again returning to a mix of consulting/freelancing while investing in personal product development initiatives.

Ahead of this, over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some blog infrastructure updates and also did a revamp of my Elixir Consulting page. I’ve also started promoting my availability on various socials and LinkedIn.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to increase my presence in the Elixir community. I’ll shadow the Elixir Slack and Elixir Forums, helping where I can, and produce educational content for the blog. If there is an open source project you need help with or want someone to pair with, please reach out.

I suspect this community outreach will consume about 70% of my time. The other 30% will be allocated to personal education and product development, which is currently in journaling / research mode.

A Nervous Excitement

I can’t share this without commenting for the records of time – it is a scary time to be looking for work.

I do not go into this with ideal world circumstances, but it is what it is.

I am more fortunate than most: I have fair savings, and I don’t have many major debts.

I suspect it will take some creative approaches (productized services, tech gig work) to regain regular income streams. While it will be difficult, I am looking forward to having some space to use my creative muscles again. Being a corporate Jira code monkey truly took a toll on my psyche.