Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Was invited to talk at today’s Freelancing for WebGeeks event. I may not be your usual freelancer, given that the venue’s not a hassle for me (Exist TechBar Manila, my current gig’s with Exist) so I obliged.
Anyway, here are my slides. As usual, they don’t make sense without me talking.
While I own an active Facebook account, I don’t “use” as much as other people use it. Heck, its been almost a year since I last scrolled down my feed.
For the interest of those who find it preposterous not to have Facebook always open in a browser tab, here are my reasons why I stopped using Facebook:
It’s been over a year and a half since I left my previous full-time job and I still don’t have a new one.
It’s not that I don’t have the skills needed to be employed; it’s actually the opposite: even though I’m not actively looking for a job, people still come to me asking if I could work for them. My part time teaching and Rails “consultancy” gigs fall under this (i.e. I never “applied” for them formally), and I’m getting emails requesting for interviews from local companies once in a while.
The reason I’m not taking any full-time job offers is different:
It’s been over a year and a half since I left my previous full-time job and I still haven’t fully recovered from burnout. I’m not confident that I’d be able to do software development “grunt-work” at peak performance for more than a few weeks on end.
After a year’s hiatus, I guess it’s safe to say that I’ve suffered permanent damage from my burnout.
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Looking back, the main turning point of my career was on January 2006.
It’s been a very busy week so I wasn’t able to write a post last Thursday. I’m still pretty busy with a bunch of stuff so this will just be a quick post.
Here’s a TED talk about what happens when you announce your goals to the world:
This has happened way too many times earlier in my life, back when I was still a hyperactive (yet introverted) loudmouth. Fortunately I learned to shut up about my goals about the time I got into college.
One good example: in my past job, there was a gym fad going around a few years back. Those who were actively announcing that they were to lose weight didn’t follow through with their gym plans, while those who just kept quiet about the whole thing (e.g. me) had the most visible results.
And that’s why I’m not talking about the stuff that’s keeping me busy these days.
I’ve finally found some time in my busy schedule to post something about the recent changes in this site.
As part of making my “freelance” status semi-official, I’m currently migrating stuff from www.bryanbibat.com to this site, www.bryanbibat.net. You might have noticed that I’ve already merged my old blogs to this single blog as well as modified the links in my portfolio pages to point to here.
Another change is the shift from using my Gmail/Yahoo Mail account to bry@bryanbibat.net, and this is what I’ll be talking about today.
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