Habits

Blogging is a habit.  Posting on Facebook and Twitter are as well, but blogging is much more difficult I find.  It’s far to easy to tell yourself that what you have to say is not interesting or that it would be better served by a small tweet.  So I became lazy, gave into that voice and stopped updating things here which basically meant that I wasn’t writing anything more significant than what could fit in 140 characters (I’m not really big on the Facebook).

So, to reacap the last (almost) 2 years.

Started tons of game projects.  Cancelled most of them.  Got divorced.  Worked full time at ASU doing educational game development.

Students of mine were in the 2011 IGF Student Showcase for their game Dust for which I was super duper proud. Left ASU and am now contracting and doing my own projects a bit more full-bore. Spent lots of time with Xander. Met a wonderful woman.  Finally  found a great project that I think other people might actually be interested in playing.  Released some assets on the Unity Asset store and made approximately zero monies when not part of a madness sale.  Helped several local indies with their games which went on to make lots of monies.

Now I’m looking forward to my game being complete, or at least complete enough to Kickstart/Indie Fund.  I’ll be writing more about that on the Happy Camper Studios blog.  I’m also getting back into doing contract work, all Unity3D this time, which I of course hate rounding up as it’s lots of work for speculative returns.  Currently though I’m working with the most awesome Archaeology Southwest on a 3d kiosk to be placed in Chaco Canyon.  I’ve never worked on something that is a physical product, so  that’s pretty dang exciting.  That will be ending soon though, so then it’s back to the contractor (data) mines to find some new clients.

End of career #1

Today is officially the last day I will be an IT professional.  Starting tomorrow (well, really next week) I’m a full time educator and part time assistant adult hockey league director.  Of course the topics that I’m teaching are IT related, specifically software engineering and graphics programming, but I won’t be doing it full time anymore.  This is both refreshing and terrifying.  I’ve been doing IT pretty much straight through since I got my first job at 17 helping build out a startup ISP.  Now I get to change gears.  Instead of tech being what pays the bills, tech gets to go back to stuff I do for fun, which I’m hoping will mean that I make progress on the many stalled projects I’ve had going for weeks/months/years.  I’m not sure what career #2 is going to turn into but I’m sure tech will sill be there, hanging around as it’s been all my life.

And now for something completely different

This is a rambly, what’s-going-on-in-Dave’s-life sort of post with very little content of interest who don’t know me and/or are stalking me.  You have been forewarned.

I have a habit of jumping around between jobs.  I find that I’m rarely satisfied for long in a position as the thrill of learning a bunch of new stuff wears off, the grind sets in and the drudgery of doing real work is all that’s left.  To many, this penchant for flittery is a big fat check mark in the negatives column while evaluating me as an employee candidate.  Then again I probably don’t want to work for people who care about such things.  This is not to say I never stay put.  I spent 2 years running my own company and there was plenty of drudgery amongst the fun (and terrifying) learning activities such a job afforded.  So, when it seemed the end was drawing near for my time as a failed entrepreneur I made a pledge to myself.  I didn’t want to get stuck right back into those boring jobs I had fled several years back.

Since there wasn’t a lot of excitement for me in the types of jobs I was likely to be offered I started wondering, where can I go?  I had been teaching at the Art Institue of Phoenix for 2.5 years at that point and I knew that I enjoyed my work there.  It was peripherally related to software development (which I still love) but conveniently avoided all those pesky issues like customers and deadlines and software that actually has to work.  It also afforded me much more opportunity to play with and develop game technology, the very thing I had gone to college for all those years ago.  Perfect!

I was all set to move over to the Art Institue when the next surprise came along.  I had written a rather lengthy letter expressing my concerns and dissatisfaction with various elements of the adult hockey league at Oceanside Ice Arena.  I expected to get back something stating “Your concerns have been noted, now buzz off”.  What I got back was “Those are some really great points, this is what I’m going to do to address them, oh and by the way do you want a job as assistant adult hockey director?”.

…?

That’s the first time I’ve ever been offered a job by complaining.  So I met with the rink’s manager and in the next few weeks I’ll begin to take on duties as assistant adult hockey director.  Check mark in the “try something new” category.  Luckily the hockey gig is mostly evenings and the Art Institute is mostly daytime so they’re quite compatible.

So, I leave a full time software engineering job, go to teaching and managing a hockey league.  Sounds like a pretty good career shake-up to me.

He’s back baby!

After switching my domain about a year ago my blog has been offline. Sadness. I tried at various points to use some Ruby libraries to upload my old posts over, but to no avail. I have had some initial success with wordpress.com but have overall been stymied by the atom post system (which seems to not accept “normal” RFC3339 dates). At some point all these old posts will magically appear in here once I can figure out how to get the dates posted and categories converted, etc.