February 6, 2006

Mule Design It’s taken me a while to actually do the deed, but today I handed in my letter of resignation at the Anchorage School District. As of February 21, 2006, I’ll be under contract with Mule Design as Lead Developer.

I’m really excited about the chance to work full-time with these folks. I’ve been doing small part-time jobs for them since September, and it’s gone very, very well. That part-time work has given us the opportunity to get to know each other and to figure out how we’re going to work 4,000 miles apart. Yes, that’s correct. Katie and I are staying in Anchorage. We bounced around the idea of moving down there, but ultimately Katie and I decided that we couldn’t move down there as quickly as Mule and I wanted to start working together, so the team at Mule very graciously agreed to try a long-distance contract. So far it’s working very well. It helps that we’re only one hour apart and that San Francisco is pretty easy to get to from Anchorage, but it’s still a huge gesture of faith on their part, and it’s very appreciated.

I find that I’m ambivalent about leaving the school district, but not so much because it’s a great job. Don’t get me wrong, it has been a great job and I’ve learned things there that I might not have learned otherwise. When I took the job, I had the amorphous title of “Webmaster” working in the Public Relations department. I was the first person hired specifically to work on the web site, which ran Webstar on a Workgroup Server 80. I eventually upgraded the machine to blue and white G3 and added some database functionality with FileMaker Pro before finally moving over to the Information Technology department, which had just hired their own web developer. He and I set about building the district’s intranet and web development team which has had as many as five full-time developers/programmers and one content specialist (the PR position that “webmaster” eventually turned into).

But the reason that I’m leaving is really that I want to do other stuff. I’m an okay programmer and I’ve written some stuff that I’m pretty proud of, but it’s not where my passion lies. The thing that really fires my rockets, that really makes me stand up and whoop with joy when it goes right, is building web pages. The HTML and CSS. And that’s what I’m going to get to do for Mule. Mike and Amber are both amazing designers, and I love taking a Photoshop comp and figuring out how to make it semantic, valid, and look exactly the same as the comp. That last one is the trick. It’s like doing a puzzle, but in a way that programming isn’t.

There are some other considerations. Since I’ll be contracting with Mule for at least a while, we’ll be using COBRA to keep my insurance from the school district. But that’s expensive and only lasts eighteen months. We’ve started looking around at alternatives, but as you can imagine, the prospects are disheartening. But we’ll figure it out. It feels like the country is reaching some sort of critical mass with regards to health care and insurance, and I know for a fact that we’re not the only ones looking.

Anyway. Into the future!

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