How’s it going? Alright mate!
Since finishing at my old company I’ve been busy doing a number of things to keep myself occupied, obviously finding new work is priority but I’ve a little bit of time to do my own thing. I’ve no meetings, no JIRA tickets to deal with and I could just switch off completely for a day if I wanted to.
Sadly my car had to go and that’s been collected tomorrow but we still have the other one and will have to go back to sharing it for awhile. The plus side is that it’s one less thing to pay for and right now that’s a good thing. However if I needed to nip off somewhere, not so easy.
I’m still being paid for the moment, one more payday though which includes this month’s money and the redundancy package. I’m going to put that to one side though. No fancy holidays no new synth hardware. Not for now.
The job market is very weird, things aren’t what they used to be like when I was last searching for jobs five years back. The industry I work in, technology, writing code as a Senior Developer is changing so fast. AI is here and if you don’t embrace it as an engineer, you’re in for a rough ride where employment is concerned.
I’m looking more now at contracting, freelancing as a consultant maybe getting involved in some open source projects looking for new income streams. It all carries risk.
Interviews have taken place but so far I’ve struggled to make it past stage one of what tends to be, three or four steps to an offer, the barrier to entry has risen. Getting a regular job in my line of work has become painful.
The opportunities are shrinking faster than I’d ever imagined.
So….
I’ve not let this beat me. I’m going to probably establish my own thing and so far it’s this.
My consultancy where AI is at the heart of what I do. I decided to get a quick site together and plan to iterate on it fast over the coming days, to establish what services I plan to offer and the rates.
It may also become a tuition platform for businesses to learn about these tools.
I may even integrate this with Hive.
It’s all written using TypeScript, React and Astro, hosted on Netlify, the code is of course on Github for others to check out.
I’ll write more about it and might look at a way where I can write my content in markdown, push to the repo and create a script that publishes that same article to Hive, setting a flag when completed to say, this one has been Hived!
I wish we could offload cars... You know we are paying Aussie road tax for a car in UK? We can't register it there as we have no official UK address and can't ship back as it's officially imported there and we can't afford it, so we will just wing it and drive it round anyway... But figured as long as it's registered here at least it's ... Kinda legit? Lol.
Website looks good. How will you spread the word?
That’s an interesting situation with your car, is that because the DVLA have got your current address? How peculiar. You can’t change it?
I need to put my marketing hat on and whilst social media is all very well, it may or may not be the right audience. So I’m considering making more direct contact with the companies or businesses, I would like to support.
The other option is to develop a product. I have had some ideas but need to sketch them out better.
I help a couple of people out with websites for clubs and village halls, all of which tend to be very piecemeal and it’s incredible that these sites keep running. Mainly built on Wordpress with a load of plugins. I’m considering building a booking system, that takes payments, handles cancellations and marketing that to various customers.
As I say, I just need to write this all up.
Its also about continuity of income, do certain things now to earn money, keep it rolling and other things that need s bigger investment in time, in parallel.
No the DVLA don't have anything. But the car has importation papers.
Good luck with finding your niche and bringing in some p.
Good luck with the project. I'm glad I'm not looking for work right now. I still need to get to grips with AI, but it's not used so much where I am.
Good luck with the job hunting, hope things improve soon
Thank you