October 22nd will be my last day with CPCC. I've had a experience with the College, starting in 2006 when I was a student and got my first job, doing Helpdesk support. Since then, I moved to web development and ended my student experience. I've been learning from a great team instead, both about development and about working with/around clients to ship projects. And it's been extremely rewarding; for the last two years, I've been continuously working on projects that are immediately useful for students and staff. It's been gratifying to see my code used - and, from time to time, embarrassing when it screws up. Which, as my CPCC coworkers can attest, isn't an uncommon occurrence.

Actually, one of the coolest parts of my job has been replacing applications that I used as a student. Having that kind of visible impact is something many developers don't experience, and I'm very grateful - and still surprised at my own luck - that I had that chance.
But for the last few months I've felt increasingly weighted. I've been in Charlotte for 13 years; I have no real memories of living anywhere else. And after I moved into my own place, and had a job, I started feeling like Charlotte wasn't really where I wanted to start my adult life. Charlotte's a perfectly good city - but I always knew I couldn't stay too long, as much as I enjoyed the work.

Between full-time work at CPCC and side contracting, I've also had very little time to write... as if you couldn't tell from my debianesque posting frequency. I'd like to start up again, and I'm starting by posting my working drafts publicly. Unfortunately, my writing has become very rusty; writing emails, documentation and code is nothing like writing for a blog. But enough about that, because Jeff Atwood is right.

I'm deliberately not making plans too far into the future, and I'll be travelling light - other than my kindle, my laptop and maybe my desktop, I don't intend to bring much with me when I move. For the next 6+ months, I expect to focus on only contract work and open-source projects - including getting more involved with Django's 1.2 release. Beyond that, I don't know, but if I find that I like full-time freelancing, I'll probably stick to that for some time to come.