Michaelbox

 

Despite hav­ing a run­down of each day’s activ­i­ties in an ever­note note, I am going to get this blog post writ­ten and pub­lished before I for­get any details. This may be a long post, be warned.

Intro­duc­tion

As some of you may know, I was recently invited to an in-person doc­u­men­ta­tion sprint with Mozilla, in their Cal­i­for­nia offices. We would be spend­ing three days together work­ing on Mozilla Devel­oper Net­work (MDN), edit­ing, revis­ing, and cre­at­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, demos, and exam­ples for mod­ern web tech­nolo­gies. For those of you who don’t know, MDN is Mozilla’s cen­tral loca­tion for doc­u­ment­ing all of their projects as well as as much pos­si­ble about the open web. I was thrilled to be invited, but was nat­u­rally hes­i­tant because I was not sure how I would afford to make such a trip. How­ever, Mozilla said that they were going to cover the costs of air travel, acco­mo­da­tions, and hotel. Once I real­ized that all of that was going to be taken care of, there was lit­tle that would man­age to make me say no, and after con­fer­ing with my par­ents, I hap­pily accepted the invite, and started prepar­ing for the trip.

I do not get to travel very much, and when I do, it’s usu­ally not very far, so while I would be work­ing on “web nerd” stuff major­ity of the time there, I always con­sid­ered this to be a vaca­tion for myself, in a state that I had never been to. As an added bonus, my good friend and some­times work part­ner Amy Crook lived in the area and I knew I’d have the chance to meet her as well. I flew out from Sioux Falls in the early after­noon of Thurs­day, April 26th, and arrived in San Fran­cisco around 4pm-4:30pm Pacific Stan­dard time. This allowed me enough time to get to the hotel that I’d be stay­ing at, get checked and set­tled in, and meet up with Amy at the Ferry Build­ing in San Fran­cisco. This build­ing was within a block of the hotel, mean­ing I was very close to the San Fran­cisco Bay for the dura­tion of my visit. How­ever, I did run into some small stum­bling blocks in that my debit card was not liked by the hotel’s sys­tem, and I was not going to be able to use it any­where inside the hotel. This proved to not be an issue at all as I avoided any charges the whole time, and I was able to get some money out of the ATM, just in case I needed some. After a won­der­ful meal and talk time with Amy, we parted and I spent the rest of the night in the hotel, wait­ing to hear of offi­cial plans for the next day. I didn’t want to go wan­der­ing around quite yet because I had just got­ten there and knew no one. Finally Friday’s agenda showed up via email.

Fri­day

Friday’s agenda had us spend­ing time in Mozilla’s main office, located in Moun­tain View Cal­i­for­nia. In order to get there in time to put in a good hard day’s work, we needed to leave by about 7:15am. It was at this time that I started meet­ing every­one I’d be spend­ing the week­end with, and get­ting to know them ini­tially. We had a group of about 10 peo­ple, from as close as Los Ange­les, and as far away as Bre­men Ger­many. From here, we all pro­ceeded towards the local sub­way sta­tion and made our way south. Once we reached the end of the sub­way sys­tem, we trans­ferred to Cal­train to make the rest of the trip into Moun­tain View. Once we arrived, we had an ini­tial dis­cus­sion about what each of us wanted to work on and quick brain­storm­ing for top­ics that peo­ple could choose from.

Fire­fox logo on the Mozilla Moun­tain View office wall

This first day was a slow start for me, and I didn’t do any hugely sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions, but did stick to minor edits and rewrites to help make top­ics more clear for oth­ers. Lunch was even­tu­ally deliv­ered and we all enjoyed some sand­wiches by a local busi­ness, and was a nice break. Oth­er­wise, bev­er­ages and snacks were avail­able in the kitchen areas of the office. Towards the end of the day, I noticed a note in the col­lab­o­ra­tive ether­pad hold­ing the group’s notes, that there was a request for some work to be done on the “Fire­fox for Devs” sec­tion, and some help with docs relat­ing to the new devel­oper tools that are being built into Fire­fox. Since this is one area I have inter­est in, I noted that I would work on it more on Sat­ur­day. After we were done work­ing for the day, we headed to The Can­tan­ker­ous Fish for din­ner. I am not a seafood fan by any means, but I was not going to make myself the sore thumb of the group, and made do with a Roasted Beet Salad. After din­ner, we reversed our path and made our way back to San Fran­cisco. If we all learned any­thing on our offi­cial first day, it’s to make sure that when pass­ing out train tick­ets, you don’t pass out the receipt as a ticket, and leave the actual ticket behind. Thank­fully the crew on the train were kind enough to not kick one of our group mem­bers off, and we were able to fin­ish the trip. Finally we got back to the hotel and said our good­nights after work­ing out when we were meet­ing the next morn­ing. I wasn’t quite ready to retire to my room quite yet, and decided to spend an hour or so wan­der­ing around the imme­di­ate area and made it my mis­sion to find my way to the San Fran­cisco office a night early. I made a cou­ple incor­rect turns, but thanks to GPS, I was able to get back on the right path, and found the loca­tion before return­ing to the hotel for the night.

Sat­ur­day

Since we were stay­ing in town on Sat­ur­day, we were able to sleep a bit more, and agreed to meet in the lobby around 8:30am before mak­ing our way to Mozilla’s San Fran­cisco office. This day was much more pro­duc­tive for me, as I cre­ated and wrote up a lot of doc­u­men­ta­tion on cre­at­ing and man­ag­ing Fire­fox pro­files for var­i­ous rea­sons includ­ing test­ing out Firefox’s mul­ti­ple devel­op­ment chan­nels. I also man­aged to get other quick edits in, much like I did on Fri­day. The work por­tion of the day was very much like Friday’s, and lunch was once again pro­vided by a local com­pany. To end the work day, we had a brief pre­sen­ta­tion show­ing access­abil­ity tech­nol­ogy used on the MDN web­site. This proved to be sur­pris­ingly use­ful as together we dis­cov­ered that a hid­den area at the top of the page was the first thing that the tab key went to. This is not opti­mal for some­one who is blind, and I’m sure a bug was filed. Due to our evening plans, the work day was sched­uled to end an hour and a half ear­lier. These plans included a ferry ride up to Sausal­ito for din­ner. This was a very excit­ing chance for me as I knew we would be rid­ing past the famed Alca­traz prison as well as see­ing the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance(we’d be going over the GGB later to get home). Once we reached Sausal­ito, we had about an hour of time avail­able before our reser­va­tion at Pog­gio, so we all went our sep­a­rate ways to browse the local shops. This is really the first and only time I spent any money on some­thing other than some cof­fee or air­port food. How­ever, what I did buy was candy, mostly salt water taffy, but also some other hard can­dies, includ­ing Atomic War Heads. Din­ner at Pog­gio was extremely nice and eas­ily the most expen­sive meal we had together. I went with a very tasty Margherita pizza and beer from Drake’s Brew­ery. After din­ner and much non-business con­ver­sa­tion, we took a taxi ride back to the hotel. Once again, we all agreed to meet in the lobby at 8:30am to make our way to the office for our last day together.

Sun­day

The last day was pretty straight­for­ward. We kept at it, doing what we could and get­ting stuff done. Lunch was pizza. Early in the after­noon our first per­son left, but the rest of us remained. We ended the work day with one last group dis­cus­sion and thanks for all of the hard work that every­one put in. We orig­i­nally didn’t have a set plan for that evening, but by the time sun­day after­noon came around, we were all ready to find a bar and just kick back and relax together one last time. We made our way over to 21st Amend­ment Brew­ery in San Fran­cisco, and had din­ner and bev­er­ages. This loca­tion pro­vided what ended up being my favorite beer the entire week­end. The name was “Monk’s Blood” and I found it extremely tasty. Sadly, it is not avail­able in South Dakota, and 21st Amendment’s web­site men­tioned that the brew will be going into hiber­na­tion in the near future. Finally we all made our way back to the hotel for the last time. I opted to stay in my room the rest of the night due to being tired from the long but pro­duc­tive week­end. My flight was sched­uled for 10:50am the next morn­ing. Due to three of our group hav­ing flights near the same time, and one of us hav­ing rented a car, we trav­eled to the air­port in the morn­ing together.

Con­clu­sion

Over­all, I am extremely happy with how every­thing went and enjoyed every minute of the trip. I am appre­cia­tive and thank­ful that Mozilla would be will­ing to pro­vide the abil­ity for their com­mu­nity mem­bers to get together and help make the inter­net a bet­ter place. Hope­fully I can par­tic­i­pate again in per­son in future doc sprints. If not, then there’s always remote help. If you are curi­ous about details regard­ing who worked on what, you can read the offi­cial sum­mary of the week­end at Mozilla Hacks.

 

This is an evolv­ing list I’m sure, but I just wanted to get the ini­tial one out the door. Feel free to add sug­ges­tions in the comments.

• Move myself up to a more com­pet­i­tive posi­tion in rates
• Bet­ter under­stand javascript and jquery
• get my finances to a point of sta­bil­ity and being able to afford the same perks that an tra­di­tional employer offers
• Vote in the South Dakota Pri­mary Elec­tions this sum­mer, for the only can­di­date worth their weight in gold.
• Get at least three patches into the core code for WordPress
• Help make top-notch doc­u­men­ta­tion for Word­Press in their theme/plugin devel­op­ment areas of the Codex
• Help make top-notch doc­u­men­ta­tion for the Mozilla Devel­oper Network
• Locally net­work more and meet new peo­ple, both per­son­ally and professionally.
• Launch Hand.Writtentweets, my too long touted idea.
• Get this site here on an orig­i­nal design
• Drop sup­port for IE7 in my free­lance work
• Meet at least one of the Word­Press Core commiters
• Attend a big-time WordCamp

 

I’d like to get some dis­cus­sion going here.

Is the web design/development indus­try boom­ing, a bit stag­nent, or hurting?

Are you fel­low web pro­fes­sion­als doing well for your­self, man­ag­ing to get by, or per­haps hurt­ing a bit, espe­cially with these tough eco­nomic times?

 

This is a fol­low up post to the one I made last spring, located here

I am not going to go into much recap for where I was at seven months ago. If you want to see details, please go read the post. In short, I was let go by the com­pany I worked for since Sep­tem­ber, and dove head-first into free­lance full time.

It has now been a bit more than half a year since I started swim­ming around the free­lance pool, and I have to say that it is the best thing I could have done at the time. Since then, I have kept my eye open for pos­si­ble posi­tions with local com­pa­nies, and even got to go through the inter­view process with at least one of them, but none came to to fruition. By late sum­mer 2011, I had come to real­ize and decide that stick­ing to free­lanc­ing is going to be my best option and what’s best for me at this point in my life.

I have been very for­tu­nate dur­ing 2011. I feel that I have man­aged to keep earn­ing a liv­ing in web devel­op­ment by find­ing a hand­ful of peo­ple that can ben­e­fit from hav­ing me be a part of their projects. They have always been the project man­agers of the work, and I’ve been hired for the devel­oper side of things. This is from a mix­ture of both local and remote peo­ple, which is some­thing I really appre­ci­ate. I like that I have been brought up numer­ous times by local busi­nesses as some­one who is both capa­ble and able to do the needed work, and appre­ci­ate that they are will­ing to help me out. I can def­i­nitely under­stand that they can’t afford or don’t choose to hire a per­son for an in-house posi­tion, the steady work to jus­tify just may not be there. Both the com­pany and I ben­e­fit through con­tract work for the projects they do have. It allows me to rub elbows with them and the peo­ple involved, as well as help me earn my liv­ing, and they get the project done(and done well), and know that they can count on me for pos­si­ble future work. Last­ing rela­tion­ships are being formed. It’s also per­sonal hope that if some of these com­pa­nies get to a point where they are look­ing to grow and can jus­tify bring­ing in a new web devel­oper to the mix, they can ask me if I would like to have the posi­tion, because they know first hand how I work and the qual­ity I produce.

When it comes to the remote con­tacts, I feel that I am in a sweet spot. Some of them are peo­ple who dis­like or strug­gle with CSS and get­ting the web­site to be like designed, but are per­fectly capa­ble of the actual design process. Oth­ers have def­i­nitely been capa­ble of all the work I am hired for, but have so much going on that they con­tract peo­ple to do the work so they can focus on other parts of the over­all project. With the help of these peo­ple, I have got­ten the chance to work with peo­ple from Cal­i­for­nia all the way to Ire­land, on a wide vari­ety of site top­ics. These top­ics include per­sonal port­fo­lio redesign, daily deals to save money, and even a karaōke band, among many others.

How­ever, I can not claim web devel­op­ment as my only job. In late August, I also got myself a part time job in town help­ing a local gro­cery store, fill­ing in for 10–15 hours a week. For me, the rea­sons are jus­ti­fi­able, as it gets me out of the house for a bit each shift, and gets me mov­ing around and active, as well as pro­vid­ing a lit­tle bit of extra spend­ing money. Who could argue against that?

In the end, I have got­ten to work with peo­ple from a lot of dif­fer­ent areas on a lot of dif­fer­ent top­ics, doing what I love and enjoy, which is aid­ing in mak­ing stuff for the inter­net, and I don’t plan to stop. Once again, what can I help you with?