Effort renewed

The "tech" market is still weird. This is evident by tech hiring not being as forward as in past years. My sense is that it is improving but the longer tail of this slowdown can hit us consultant and contractor types in expected ways. Most companies that are healthy to hire right now would rather hire and invest in-house. This means fewer contracts out there and that presses down on rates as the crudest variable.

I started putting more effort into looking for additional contract work in the last few months. Not an aggressive hunt but more effort. End of year is kind of crap for getting stuff done though. I'm stepping the effort up a bit further with the new year.

My situation is alright. I have work. But I have signals that my main client wants to wrap up most of my engagement, keep me on a retainer to support their team. That's fine and natural. A couple of my teammates will be shifting clients to a new and exciting collaboration. Pumped about that.

The end of the year disrupts the normal flow of work and that affects cash flow. And to be more transparent than is appropriate, cash is not where I want it to be. It is fine. It works. But last vacation season ate up a lot of margin and restoring it has been slow. A miscalculation on our (me and my wife's) end and we can put money back into the company to cover any blips. The main reason that cash is not where I want it to be is that I have been working 20 hour weeks for most of the year and that has paid most of our two salaries. I've optimized heavily for life which is hard to regret.

Now I need to tune for reducing economic stress. I want more comfortable margins and previously that would have been a matter of picking up more hours that I'd negotiated away. The market is different now so I am reaching out into my network.

And it is working. Past Lars did something right. I am getting responses, I am scheduling conversations and they will either all lead to nothing or all lead to work because when are things ever in balance?

Actually to continue the transparency I can outline some of what I have proposals and conversations about:

• Upcoming retainer, technical advisor/board person for a bootstrappy company. Tech and data, occasional hands on keyboard when money is flowing.
• Proposed a stipend for making a video series of my Unpacking Elixir blog series in collaboration with the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. Hope it gets accepted :)
• Talk about marketing opportunities and collaborations with a larger software consultancy. Likely going to be "influencer" work producing "content". Which means I get to write and record about the BEAM which is exactly what I want.
• "Content" work producing tutorials, documentation and perhaps video for a cool open source project backed by a neat company. Also in the Elixir space.
• Assorted recruitment leads, nothing too lively.

The vague ones are vague because I want them to be. For now. Most things don't materialize immediately, many never do.

I've sent out assorted other tendrils to see if I can get some backing in building some of my ideas for data pipeline stuff. I have conversations with people in my network as well.

Clearing the holidays feels freeing. I can get back to work instead of feeling concern about needing to get back to work. It was also a good break.

This has been your report from the loud online consultant trenches. Let me know if you have questions. You can reply to this email or poke me on the fedi @lawik@fosstodon.org, I enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.