I think I hinted at it in a few other blog entries, but I basically do work on the side. I don’t get paid for it, but if it looks like work, may as well call it that.
A friend of mine asked me a few months back to help him implement an idea for a software product he wanted to spin into something. I like him and it sounded like it could be some interesting software development, so I agreed to help.
On the technology side, it’s basically a Java servlet engine, Jetty, hosting a servlet (stuff I write), backed by Hibernate, Cloudscape/Derby, and using some other interesting common and uncommon tools as part of the project: JAXB, JUnit, Ant, Eclipse, Subversion, MoinMoin, Roundup and quite a few others. I think I may be using more development tools for this side “hobby” than at certain points during my last day job as a programmer!
Overall it’s fun, and it fills the technical void that my day job sometimes leaves me with. I must admit, however, some weeks it’s a huge time requirement that’s hard to meet, especially earlier on in the development cycle, when there’s a lot of churn laying down the groundwork, and not so much to show for it. Thankfully we seem to be past that stage at this point.
