RomSteady's Journal: Being a contractor

I have taken a side job as a contractor, and I'm debating as to whether or not to keep it.

When I was working at Microsoft, I knew the project intimately and I could work on anything and use as much time as needed as long as it advanced the project.

Now, I'm working for Layton City, and I've got 30 projects on my plate. I can work on any of them at any time, although I'll usually focus on one or two for a couple of weeks to advance them quite a ways or even finish them.

With this contracting gig, I was told to work on a shipping module for an ASP.NET E-commerce web site. He told me that some of his customers needed to restrict shipping options based off of mileage. That was the extent of the direction I was given.

I decided to take on the distance module first. I spent a few hours getting used to his code base, then wrote the distance module. I used a binary search algorithm after splitting it based off of the first digit of their ZIP code. Got it down to an average of 4 comparisons. Not bad.

Then, I decided to work on USPS Priority Mail. It took me about 4 1/2 hours to develop the PriMail interface. It uses two internal LUT's that need to be updated when there are new postal rates and zones, but because of the way I developed it, it is one of the fastest shipping modules for USPS out there.

Immediately after finishing each module and the test harness for the module, I delivered it. UPS and FedEx don't have open code for searching, so I hadn't started work on those yet.

Last night, I got an E-mail saying he was going to buy a component rather than use mine. Evidently, paying $270 for 18 total hours of meetings, design work, and coding specific to his site was too much.