Swinging from Tree to Tree

Last time I updated this blog it was the night before starting a new job, and on the eve of starting yet-another new job, I thought it would be a good time to recap.

The Old

At the beginning of the year I started work at Sponsaurus, a little sports-sponsorship management start-up working out of the StartPad offices. The idea was good, the people were great, and building a site from scratch using the latest-and-greatest toys was addictively fun. Things that were “20 pounds of awesome in a 10 pound bag” :

• CEO Bruce P. Henry, and co-developer and fellow Kashless alum John Postlethwait. Working with them was always great fun, and I would happily do so again anytime.
• MongoDB, as provided by MongoHQ, and the MongoMapper ODM. I’ve raved about Mongo before, but it was the first time I’d used it in production.
• The Warden and Devise authentication framework. It was especially useful in that it works well with Mongo, and allows user accounts to be scoped, when serving multiple virtual sites.
• The Heroku Ruby cloud-hosting service. MongoMapper’s John Nunemaker puts it best in You’re an Idiot for Not Using Heroku.

To my great disappointment, Sponsaurus’ first round of funding fell-through, and they were forced to suspend development after just three weeks. So it was back to job hunting, but with the added wrinkle of having fallen madly in love with the start-up lifestyle. I was dreading having to take just any old code monkey job to pay the bills.

The New

It’s not at all lost on me that almost all of my coding gigs have come as recommendations from friends-of-friends. In the latest case, Bruce introduced me to Conceivian, a custom Rails shop in Redmond, and I’m now their Lead Developer. They specialize in building prototype websites for other start-up companies, which means an endless supply of green-fields coding projects to feed my start-up addiction. It’s also a small team, which means little-to-no politics (yuk). So here goes …