So I'm riding the upswing of a biploar phase. I've gotten back to developing for a side php project with a colleague for a guy who runs a small business selling Porsche keys and lock restoration services. I've also got my mom who started an increasingly successful Day Spa in Florida to think about collecting her appointments in Excel. I plan to turn her appointment data into a small datamart she can use for cross sell/upsell/customer data mining. If it works for her, maybe it can be franchised. I'd have to do a study on what's already out there.
The new routine that works for me is to get up at 5am - 6am to check daily data loads for work. If all is well, I stick around and read or work a little at a time on a side project. If I don't disturb them, the wife and kids may sleep til 9am or 10am. A little at a time is key. Things add up after a while to more than most people ever get done. I just need to complete a few of these to a mature state so I can start displaying them, telling stories about them, using them as a platform to show I'm worthy of a higher level of coolness and credibility that I'm at. As a friend Brad says, "To Be The Man."
Well this particular morning, I'm backed up on work for the job. If I can clear my plate, next week will be more free to work on the side things again. I'm starting to complete some small projects at work that fill holes in our operations and finance. We seem to like to write contracts with service level penalties for non-compliance without having reporting systems or even transactional systems to provide the data to back up whether or not we are complying with service levels. You need the features to get new partners but you don't give much heads up to the developers to implement the features. Alternatively, you make contracts that are convoluted at best to implement through your transactional data. Fucking typical. The one benefit is that someone like me looks like a hero when I through the grace of God can piece together enough of the transaction data to build the 90% solution to the problem until they realize the 100% solution to the problem will cost much more than the contract was worth (speculating, I don't really know).
If my options are worth anything substantial and if I have a business plan and a few completed projects that I can brag about by October 22, I will seriously consider consulting on my own part-time and building software for small businesses part-time. Something like that. I'll be 34 in a little over 2 weeks and I swear I still try to fight against the dying of the light. I also have a protege in my 16 year old nephew who is going to college next year and wants to follow in my footsteps. Got to have a business plan that ties these things together. My next trip to the Philippines will have to have me posting to Craig's list for find candidates to work out of my wife's old office space on software projects that I've started.
