In March of this year, having largely finished writing my first book on web application programming with PHP and MySQL, I realised it was time to find another contract. I hadn’t worked in nearly a year, and the reserves were getting a little bit lower than I would normally like.

Around then, I started getting a number of emails and phone calls from people interested in having me come work for them for a while. Most of the jobs were to write some .NET applications or tools, or otherwise C/C++ things related to OLE2/COM that I did all the time when I worked for Microsoft in the 1990s. The money for these contracts is usually good, and I was relieved to learn I wasn’t going to be smashing open the piggy bank for extra funds.