Thanks for the kind words @Rabble, @cinnamon, and @mixmix. I really appreciate that positive feedback. ❤
Your question kicked off a long train of thoughts, here's some of them:
- I've mostly worked on small teams (< 12 engineers) and enjoyed it lots.
- I'm in UTC-7/UTC-8 and prefer some timezone overlap for synchronous comms, but I've worked remotely since forever and I don't need to be in the exact same timezone.
- I'd be excited to work in a cooperative, but I haven't seen many tech cooperatives around.
- I've built lots of products and strongly prefer experiences where we had actual customers that we talked to (often!) over moonshot omega projects. I'm fine with boring, I just like to be useful.
- I don't remember if I've mentioned this, but I spent my first ~year freelancing as a designer rather than as a developer. Turns out I have more fun and I'm better at development, but I have tons of respect for good designers and love having dedicated design folks on my team. I love good designers.
- I've worked on lots of old and janky codebases and I think I'm skilled at paying off technical debt if the team culture allows it. I love static analysis and provision scripts and containers and building resilient systems to keep old software running predictably.
- Working in software means learning lots of stuff, but my head has been full of JavaScript for a few years now and so I think I'm looking for JS/TS work -- especially on the web.
- I'm not very excited about React/Vue/Angularetc, but I can work with them productively. (I think they often add development time and complexity to products that rarely need the solutions that Google/Facebook are reaching for.)
- I put jQuery / WordPress in a similar category -- I can be productive with them, but I'd be bummed if they were a big part of my job.
- I'm especially interested in learning Go/Rust, or working in distributed systems. I love the web, and want to continue improving it. Building on top of Linux would be sweet, and I'd be really excited to produce open source software as part of my job.
- This probably goes without saying, but I have zero interest in working in the "defense" industry.
- I've enjoyed working on developer tools and would love to do that professionally. I've had lots of fun contributing to Docker, React, GitHub, Carto, LayerVault, Homebrew, ESLint, and LevelDB, and would be really excited to work on similar projects.
Aside: I appreciate the patience while I'm extra-async in this thread. I've been staying off my computer during nights and weekends and been trying to limit my job search time to like ~30 minutes per weekday so that I'm not getting distracted from my SSB maintenance work. Thanks!!!