David

Yesterday, I was brought into a room of with a bunch of other folks from work and let go.. laid off.. fired.. whatever you want to call it. It’s the first time I’ve ever been fired from a job and I’ll go ahead and call it the end of a corporate micro-era for me. I’m guessing they needed to cut about $250,000 off of the monthly payroll and they were certainly paying me well enough to be on the chopping block. I can’t blame the company.. they really needed to trim some “fat” as their profits have been steadily declining over the last year. I knew this before I even came on board and who was I to think that I could really make a difference in this trend. I really felt bad for many of the older folks in the room who’ve been with the company for twenty years or more. That’s what it looked like, they were laying off anyone disposable with good salary and benefits as only one salaried employee was left on the web development team. The others are all on contract through temp agencies. I’ll miss some of my co-workers but I’m not too sad over it and I certainly don’t sit on my hands for long. I’ve already lined up some work in Charleston and Chapel Hill. It looks like I’ll be picking up the CSS and Flash work on some very high profile development projects. I’ve been itching for some time to do some front-end development for Django and Rails projects as I’m a bit burned out on Drupal.. Let me take this time to bitch about Drupal. OH.. Drupal- why are you lacking MVC methodology, and why do you insist on loading from bootstrap on every request. But I will say that Drupal 6 is better and Views 2 has been officially released. And while I’m at it… Morris Digital Works…. you have thirty project managers and not one bit of project management software or version control for your projects. “Top heavy” I think is the expression. I had the opportunity to build two high profile sites for them… Jacksonville.com (not live) and OnlineAthens.com. The first is part of an initiative they have to move all of their sites to Drupal. I commend them on this effort to centralize publishing efforts onto one platform and wish them all the best of luck. For me, for now.. it’s back to the old grindstone with some of the ideas I had previously tossed around with some new found insight on the publishing business. I’m actually feeling a bit giddy this morning about working in my pajamas and the freedom to compete for page views and search results again. I’m just sorry that I cut some of my good clients and co-developers loose while I was busy in the corporate void… so to pick up where I left off… I’m heading down to Charleston for a couple of days of brainstorming and then I’m heading up to Chapel Hill for the rest of the week to get this ball rolling again. C’est la vie