Hey there! It's been a while since I wrote one of these. I put it off because I think it'll be a lot of work to write so I am putting in a time limit and sending this out.
Last time I wrote I was writing a blog about VR usability. I could probably have made that work but it would have taken a lot more time and effort and cost a lot, both in terms of the equipment (PC's, hardware, etc) and the forgone salary.
I worked at Shyp for a year and a half. The idea is really good - request pickups, hand your stuff over, then Shyp packages it for you and finds the cheapest of UPS, USPS & Fedex to mail your stuff. When I got there the server side codebase had problems that caused a lot of headaches for the engineering team, and I helped get the codebase into a much more stable state. This helped reduce the number of problems at the same time as the company was growing. I'll be giving talks next year about the lessons we learned from that.
I left because I wanted to place a bigger bet on myself. For the past 5 months I've been doing software consulting - signing one month contracts to work with companies and help them solve problems in their business. It's been going really well, but I'm still working out some details - I need to charge more since the start and end of contracts don't line up perfectly. I also need to find a good lawyer.
I moved in with my girlfriend Laura to a building in Nob Hill. We got a cat named Manu and went on vacation to Vietnam and Hawaii. I submitted a patch to the Go programming language that speeds up a common operation by 10-20%, a pretty cool professional achievement. I also built a dashboard for viewing your Twilio call/message logs that's one of the best projects I've ever built.
I'm not working for the rest of the year and looking forward to relaxing, reading books and playing some golf. If you are in the Bay Area, I'd love to meet for coffee or drinks - get in touch!
Best, Kevin