SamWhited|blog

Co-op Thoughts

I have to first start by admitting that my judgment is probably compromised by my desire to have a paycheck, which is part of why I’m pushing this so hard. I’m likely about to lose my 9 to 5 and to prepare for that I’m applying for part-time work in retail hoping I can stretch my savings long enough to actually drum up some freelance work or find some other way not to have to work for large tech companies that pay well but treat their employees like dirt. I’ll be trying to take on freelance work either way, but I’d prefer to do it cooperatively with others.

That being said, though it’s consuming me a bit right now, I’m not just looking to make a paycheck out of this. I’d like to create the kind of place where anyone can feel comfortable applying and not feel like they have to be on their toes to pass a culture fit interview conducted exclusively by 20-or-30-something white men with beards. I also like the idea of a business that doesn’t try to operate on the thinnest of margins and focus exclusively on growth at all costs.

It’s important to me that the whole co-op be comfortable with (and know about) any clients we take. I’m not against discussing most things, and am open to being convinced otherwise, but I would likely vote against Defense/Police/ICE work, Right wing political campaigns, adtech, etc.

That being said, I would also not vote against someone joining the co-op who disagrees with me on any of those points.

A quick aside on the word “free speech” that Redoak mentions in his writeup: Organizations that aim to promote “free speech” but really just mean “we don’t moderate and we’re trying to co-opt the term ‘free speech’ and make it meaningless” I would vote against, but organizations that actually understand what free speech means (ACLU, EFF, FFRF, etc.) I would like to support.

Goals for the Co-op

One thing I’ve thought about doing for a while is teaching. It’s always been something I enjoy, but never something I’ve had the opportunity to do much of. I’d like to eventually be able to expand the co-op to include training, and I’d particularly like us to teach both introductory courses (probably at a steep discount for individuals wanting to learn about software) and more team-oriented corporate courses (the actual money maker, and hopefully we can improve the state of software for the users).

We will likely make use of a great deal of open source, and if we’re ever successful it would be important to me that we give back to those who made our success possible. The cooperative principals should be applied to software as well, so if we use an open source library and make money from doing so I would argue we should take some portion of that (in capital or labor) and set it aside to donate upstream if we are able to do so.

Target Areas

We’d likely have to take work where we can get it of course, but here are some areas I’d personally love to work in one day:

Personal Goals

I am not good at putting myself out there and talking to clients. Selfishly, this is another reason I’d prefer to look for freelance work with other people who may be able to do this better than I can. However, it’s also something I’d like to learn.

In general, I don’t feel like I’ve learned much at all from my last few jobs, so having a team around me that has a lot of different skills (and hopefully is okay sharing them) is something that appeals to me a lot in general, and I hope I’d have something to contribute to the groups knowledge in return.

My Skills

I am a backend developer who has worked primarily in Go. I have been working in this space since approximately 2013. I have also worked extensively in Rust, Python, and (to a lesser extent) Clojure among other languages.

I also have experience in realtime communications and have served on the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) council (the technical governing body) as well as an editor for the XEP series of documents.

To a lesser extent I have been minimally involved at the IETF with the PRECIS (internationalization), KITTEN (authorization), and TLS (TLS) working groups.

On a scale of 1–5 where 5 is “expert” and 1 is “don’t make me do this, the client will regret it” and an asterisk is “needs refreshing to get back to this number”: