Raw

Main thing, I'm now available for work. Ideally coding/related or writing, part-time, but anything considered. It has to be remote working, I've too many commitments here for anything other than occasional travel.

So short term I'm just up for anything that'll help pay the bills. Longer term, my plan is to operate under the umbrella of hyperdata.org. I'm labeling it a consultancy, with primary focus around Semantic Web technologies, but that's only a first approximation of what I've got in mind. Yes, I'll be available as a consultant (and for hands-on coding etc), but there will be two key differences from most traditional consultancies.

The first is that if I'm not convinced I personally can handle the job in question, I know a lot of people working in the related fields. I'm confident I can find appropriate expertise. So in that sense, hyperdata.org will operate as a kind of agency (initially I intend to organise this very loosely, informally, but if it seems appropriate a more formal setup is always an option). [If you've got free cycles let me know.]

The other novel aspect will be the approach to research & development. Many tech consultancies have ongoing dev projects, but they tend to be very focused around the core of their consultancy work. In the extreme (but common) case is that a particular piece or set of software is at the heart of the business, the consultancy in effect being an extended kind of support for that software.

I want to go in a different direction, actively trying to avoid any predetermined path, rather taking a more exploratory approach. The idea is to do a lot of "spike"-style development - comparatively agile and rapid, in general only taking things to the proof-of-concept stage. My little seed (and feasibility check) for this was Web Beeps. A small but fairly novel idea, which I developed just enough to get a live service running, and which in turn has spawned a load more ideas for experimentation. Web Beeps took me about a month part-time to take from notion to service, and that's the kind of ballpark timescale I've got in mind for discrete research projects.

The primary intention behind this R&D is to inform other activities, to discover effective techniques and processes. Think hobby coding or Googlesque 20% time, but on the one hand with a slightly more formal approach (a clear, typically finite life cycle for projects), on the other hand with no fixed time/resources allocation - depending on other work, it can vary between 0 and 100% of work time. If there's a contract to fulfil, that takes total precedence.

A side effect may be that certain spikes suggest themselves as suitable for further development towards some kind of commercial product. In such a case, my current feeling is that it will probably be preferable to spin them off to third parties at the first opportunity. Time will tell how that pans out. As I'll mostly be working on my own, I do have the huge advantage of being able to be flexible about business model, so if any avenues do look particularly promising I can change practice to suit.

On a personal note, experience suggests I'm most productive at computer-oriented work when I'm putting in about half the hours of a typical full-time job. Given my current circumstances, that's actually a positive. I've no great ambition to get rich quick, the motivation is just to pay the bills doing something interesting. My cost of living is relatively low, which helps. Also I'm still renovating a house, and have got loads of other hobbies, so restricted hours is a good fit.

If you think I may be of use to you, let me know.