Five months in to my twelve-month plan of getting off the Microsoft platform and things are still going reasonably well:

  • I enjoyed myself at RailsConf and was pleased to discover that I actually knew more about Rails than many attendees. I made some good contacts and on the whole it was probably worth the money I spent, despite the fact that I didn't nail down any work there and was rather ill the last couple of days.

  • My first Rails app is about to go live; the client has been asking for some changes, and has slowed the deployment schedule by a couple of weeks, but they're still happy.

  • I'm getting a bit worried that more Rails work has not yet appeared on my doorstep. I have a chance to tackle another .NET-related book, but frankly at this point I'd rather not take it. My disillusionment with Microsoft is worse than ever after their recent attack on Jamie Cansdale and TestDriven.NET.

  • I'm still spending plenty of time in Second Life, though that time is still definitely not generating positive cashflow yet; I've been chatting with a few people about potential future business opportunities there, but that's a long shot.

  • Writing for Web Worker Daily on a daily basis has been rewarding and helps fill in a bit of the income gap.


So, on the whole, I'm still feeling positive about life and work, but I still need to make more contacts and nail down some more contracts to convince myself that this move is going to work out.