Joel Hainley

I’ve been damned busy recently I picked up a new hobby, but this one doesn’t cost me any money.

“How’s that?” you ask.

I’ve taken to doing contract/consulting work in my spare time, it’s been a good bit of fun thus far, I gave my new business a loan and built a new desktop so that I could get started. I had it paid off within the first month and i’ve been getting busier and busier. I am still working fulltime for a company and doing this on the side, hence, a hobby.

I have no intentions of going fulltime with this endeavor at the moment, I enjoy where I work, and like the people, there’s little if any politics, and the commute is good. So I’m just doing this to keep myself out of trouble, not even for the money, i’m making plenty where I work now, socking an embarassing amount of my salary into savings.

I was motivated to start doing this in the beginning because I got to work with a good friend again on some contract work he needed some help with, and also to put a little extra money in my pocket. However, I have quickly realized, that while doing work on the side does bring in a good amount of cash, it give you less of an opportunity to spend it. In fact, i’m saving even more out of my salary than I was before because I have less time to spend it.

I have noticed a shift in the last few weeks though, my focus has shifted from the money i’m making to ensuring that I hit my deadlines, my budgets, and make my customers extremely happy. This has proved far more rewarding than the extra cash, although i’m not complaining about that either, but then again, i’m just putting that in savings too. ( I can’t help it, it’s compulsive )

I have bought some books I never would have bought otherwise, i bought Knuth’s TAOCP boxset and a few other books. It’s amazingly difficult to find expenses when you do computer consulting/contracting, aside from a sirius subscription, a computer, a network connection, and a phone, you just don’t need much to make a go of it.

Since a lot of my contract work thus far has been .NET development, I might get an intel laptop ( all i have is my trusty 12″ powerbook g4 ) at some point just to give myself some options when i get into crunch mode on a project, the local Panera bakery provides freewifi so I can get out and do some work outside of my bedroom on occassion. We’ll see about that though. Ok enough for tonight, I’m gonna go read before I hit the hay.