James Thigpen

So today was my first day working as a purely independent contractor. I had been working full time, then transitioned to full time contracting with the same company, and today I blossomed into being solely a consultant and owner of my awesome sexy company, Unit of Work, LLC.

And what a day it’s been! I’ve managed to… do a lot of administrative tasks. Wait. What? What’s that you say? You can’t bill for administrative tasks? Yes. Well, I know that.

But since taking on my own clients, a lot of administrative tasks had piled up working full time. My time keeping system consisted of post it notes, and while I had QuickBooks, I hadn’t actually bothered to learn how to create an invoice.

Time keeping software is scary. It’s pretty much a horrible task, so any software you use only makes a horrible task computerized and more horrible. There’s no real winning with time keeping. Nobody has ever said, “Oh man, last night, I got home and I got to record my time! It was so awesome!”

I consulted my OCD friend Lifehacker for reviews of various Time Tracking Softwares. timeEdition seemed relatively popular, so I downloaded it and started transferring all my post it notes of billable hours into it. It seems to be pretty simple which is what I wanted. Select customer, project, and task, click start, work, click stop, and bam, you’re done.

That’s nice, but entering historical hours is pretty painful. A date picker which always defaults to today, and some pretty picky time selection controls makes for rough waters. I persevered, and I think, moving forward, it will work nicely.

Likes: Simple, Easy to Use
Dislikes: Painful Manual Data Entry UX, Doesn’t Store Database in the Cloud

I could rant about QuickBooks sucking, but everyone who uses it already knows that, so I’ll leave it at that. I have nothing new to contribute.

I’m so excited though. I did Administrivia, and I loved it. I’m ready to take over the world! At least as soon as I get this invoice to save to PDF.

As part of some contract work I’m doing for one of my clients, I am pairing with one of the new developers in the company to bring them up to speed on the code base.

I can’t say anything new about paired programming in general that someone else hasn’t already said, but I can say this: it is freaking awesome. Others seem to agree.

I want to talk about my paired programming setup. We tried VNC, but it apparently sucks a lot these days. It was flakey and kept dropping connections. No idea what that was about. It also required all kinds of firewall fiddling I have no love for.

Sean Chambers told me about SharedView and Tokbox on twitter, and while I  haven’t used Tokbox yet, I must say SharedView has rocked my world. It’s so cool! No firewall baloney, you only share what you want to share, and it’d dead simple.

We use Skype for voice communication, which is always clear and well behaved. I love Skype for video chats, too. With a modern webcam, the quality is so amazing.

The combination has worked great, and combined I think we have dramatically reduced the friction of remote operating.

I have come to the conclusion that, professionally for a variety of reasons, it is time for me to move on. My current employer has been nothing but good to me, and I have learned a tremendous amount working here, but it is time for me to spread my wings and fly.

So today, I am announcing my new software/services/consulting firm: Unit of Work, LLC. A big part of my decision to venture out on my own is a desire to return to the type of work I was trained to do: image analysis and pattern recognition.

There are a few projects I have been working feverishly on in my spare time. First, is PurpleOps, an IT infrastructure monitoring, measurement, and analysis package. It is an extensible hosted “Software as a Service” platform designed to give a user not only a view into their IT infrastructure, but advanced analysis capabilities of the data recorded.

Secondly, I would also like to announce Simon, a suite of tools designed for spectral image exploration, analysis, visualization, and manipulation. Due to the high dimensional nature of spectral images, direct visualization of the data is impossible. Simon allows users to navigate spectral image data in an exploratory fashion, yielding pseudo-color renderings of the data which help to directly emphasize the features of interest.

I am also offering consulting and development services. I have experience in Biomedical Image Analysis, Mobile Computing, Enterprise Systems, and Machine Learning. I understand how business problems must drive the technical solutions, and understand the value in high-quality maintainable systems.

I cannot begin to explain how excited I am to announce this new chapter of my life, and look forward to all the new opportunities and new relationships it will foster. This is my chance to fulfill my dream of doing what I want where I want: to write amazing software in beautiful Eastern Washington. Wish me luck, and feel free to contact me regarding this new venture.

James Thigpen
Owner, Unit of Work, LLC
james.thigpen@unitofwork.com
206-905-9974 (v)
unitofwork.com