3 months into the 12-month clock for reinventing my career, so it's time to take stock again:

  • I quit my full-time .NET consulting job, effective last Friday. This was 9 months sooner than originally planned, but the time was right for a lot of reasons. This means that I'm definitely interested in talking to people who want to hire a freelancer (though I'm actually fairly busy for the month of April already). While I expect to take on some more .NET work to hold things together, my first preference is going to go to Rails work if I can find any, even if that means substantially discounting my rate.

  • I didn't do a lot of Rails work in March, mainly through lack of time (which is one reason for the sudden change of job status). I did find time to explore some of the interfaces between Rails code and LSL, the scripting language used in Second Life, which has been fun if not terribly instructive or lucrative. This has also led me to the Rubyists of Second Life group, which may end up being my local user's group (for some value of "local").

  • I'm now writing daily pieces for Web Worker Daily . This isn't going to be money to live on, and I don't expect to be a full-time writer, but it's good fill-in money and I enjoy having the new direction to stretch in. Good new set of contacts, too.

  • Traffic on this blog is still going up, roughly linearly by month. That's good, though I still need to figure out what all the doubling in the XML feed is about.

  • I'll definitely be trolling for business at RailsConf. During April I need to figure out what to do about a Mac Book (Pro?) to take along with me. At this point, roughly 75% of my daily desktop work is now on the Mac, so bringing a Windows laptop along isn't going to cut it.