Freelance

I’m no longer an employee at Standout Jobs; They will be my first freelance client.

Going freelance will let me work fewer hours, spend most of my time learning about the ‘next big thing’ and contribute to open source in the process. Here are a few things that are on my radar:

• IM as command line: Jabber + twitter
• Semantic web: micro-formats and freebase
• Collaborative filtering
• API design
• Authentication

These are interesting times for net heads, with many simultaneous inflection points, lots of freely usable data and ridiculously cheap on-demand computing.

Rails was that ‘next big thing’ about two years ago. I fell in love. After traveling across Canada and South to California, I spent months learning and prototyping. My parents thought I was crazy, spending months without a job. Maybe they’re right, and going freelance certainly won’t dispel that notion.

I fell in love a few times this past year. I’m willing to bet heavily that one of those muses is going to be the ‘next big thing’. Going freelance will afford me the time to pursue them that I just couldn’t have in a startup. It’s exciting, even if I’ll miss working as closely with the world-class team back at Standout Jobs headquarters.