Welcome to Excell.com

Garrick -
Senior Software Engineer
Contracting as lifestyle choice: "I love the flexibility and I'm looking forward to taking the summer off!"

Tell us about your career and how you got to where you are today.
You've got two kinds of people: those who live to work and those who work to live. I definitely fall in the latter category. My background is in aeronautical engineering and I did a lot of work with complex, mathematically oriented engineering software using C and Fortran. Over time, I grew very disillusioned with corporate life. I became tired of working in a reactive mode all the time. It never felt like we could solve problems globally. Although I sometimes miss the hard core mathematical programming I used to do, I'm not interested in going back to full time direct employment anytime soon.

What have you been doing on your most recent assignment?
I'm currently working with VB, ActiveX, ASP, and SQL with an internal technology group. Right now the organization is cataloging software that is downloaded by employees throughout the world. People complain that they can't find things or it takes too long to download. The objective is to build a web front end coupled with a SQL Server database that will reduce bandwidth usage through mirror sites around the world that are closer to the local machines. The last year has been interesting and the project has grown and changed quite a bit since I initially became involved.

What's been great about working as a contract consultant?
I really like the flexibility that contracting has to offer. I want to take the summer off and spend it with my kids. They are at a critical age and I'd also like to focus time on some of my hobbies which includes genealogy. I hope to get quite a bit of work done in our garden as well. I'm very active in our kid's life and it is really handy being just 10-15 minutes away. The client is very flexible about my time. I like to help out with school and scouts and get a lot of satisfaction in these areas. Sometimes I need to leave early or arrive late to accommodate these activities and it has never been an issue in this group. When I start work again in the fall, I will line up another assignment through Excell that is both fun and pays well.

What has been great about working for Excell?
I like the support that I receive and the range of assignments I have to choose from. My short commute is also really nice. Overall it has been a great experience.

Do you ever miss being a full time regular employee?
No - I really like the flexibility that contracting has to offer.

How do you keep your skills current?
I think a lot of skills development has to do with picking the right job assignment and learning by doing. I have been fortunate in that the assignments I have had to choose from through Excell have kept me at the forefront of software development in a number of areas. On the current assignment, I have been able to focus on developing an object-oriented style of web coding like if you were doing COM objects. It's a non-scalable solution, but as a design approach it is very useful. I've been blown away by evolution of Internet Explorer from the early days to where it is today and where it is headed down the road. It's been marvelous watching Microsoft products evolve and I get to work with many prerelease software products. This summer I'm going to spend some time learning XML since this is clearly the wave of the future.