Exploration Through Example

Enrique Comba Riepenhausen (@ecomba on twitter) has been demonstrating an interesting style of making a living. He travels around the world, working with companies as a programmer. When he’s done, he tells them to pay him what he was worth. That’s pretty much it.

I like strange ideas and relationships more personal than transactional, so I’d like to do this too. Here’s what I’m thinking:

• I’d like to program for you as a temporary, on-site member of the team. I prefer that to coaching these days, though the latter isn’t out of the question. I’m not bad at Clojure and Ruby¹, and my Java skills are adequate. Because I’d expect to spend a lot of time pair programming, the language isn’t nearly as much of an issue as it would be for solo work.

• I’d prefer to be in one place for one to three weeks, though longer or shorter is also possible.

• I’d like you to commit to paying for travel. (If I’m visiting more than one place on a trip, I’d divide up the responsibility.) I prefer you pay for lodging, but I’m also willing to couch surf (especially on shorter trips).

• I don’t care all that much about working on cool technology or products. I do care about the atmosphere of the team, because their mood strongly affects my own. I’m looking for teams that are optimistic, enthusiastic, context-driving and cheerfully naive in the way I talk about in this video. That rules out a large number of Enterprise teams, who so often seem incredibly burdened by the institution. (Though that does mean that the rare optimistic etc. enterprise team would be particularly tempting.)

• I have a chance to run my Top-down TDD in Clojure workshop in Oslo, Norway, in September, so I’m especially interested in European companies so that I can spend a month over there.

If you’re interested, please mail me.

¹If you’d like to see a sample of my Clojure work, here’s Midje. I can’t show you the Ruby code I’m happiest with, but you can look at Critter4Us.