Eric Smith <eric3057@yahoo.com> wrote:
+---------------
| In today's job market for programmers, spending a lot of time
| applying for programming jobs is not very cost effective.
| A much better strategy from my point of view is to take advantage
| of being unemployed by using Lisp day and night to develop whatever
| software you find interesting. And then, instead of selling yourself
| based on your Lisp skills, sell yourself as an expert in the particular
| software you developed.
+---------------
Funny you should mention: I seem to have stumbled into exactly that,
sort of.
First it was just learning CL "'cuz it was time" (after a decade of
getting tired of Scheme's minimalism), but then I found one, and then
a second, small consulting task that could easily be done in a Lisp-based
persistent application server (the kind of thing "mod_lisp" supports)
between a web server and a database (Apache & PostgreSQL, in my case).
No, I'm not making any money from it yet [both were pro-bono, for
"resume credit" only], but I can see that I *might* be able to do so,
if I can find out how to market myself well enough. Being a one-man
band at this point, my focus is server-based "bespoke technical data
processing": that is, any little weird, off-the-wall, non-standard
thingy somebody needs done quickly... and that *can't* be done with
off-the-shelf software [at least, not easily].
Yes, I'm quite familiar with and take encouragement from these:
<URL:http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html>
<URL:http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>
<URL:http://www.paulgraham.com/lwba.html>
But I'm not trying to start a full-fledged "dot.com" per se, just do
a bit of "cook-to-order" programming, but in a *server* model using Lisp
and other tools I'm most familiar with, rather than fighting with Java
or MFC or... [insert desktop programming goop de jour].
Dunno whether it'll work or not. We'll see, I guess. "Film at 11..."
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock, PP-ASEL-IA <rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607