Construction: (2007)
Change of Pace!
After leaving Lowcountry Paver, I needed a break and a change of pace. I knew a master-carpenter building a $2-million house, and so I started work immediately. The house is a luxurious 10,000sqft, located on a nearly private-island, off of Savannah, GA.
Construction is hard-work, but it was also (usually) a lot of fun! I started out at the bottom just doing general cleanup and occasional landscaping. The house was 1/2 done when I got there, and soon they needed my help putting in windows.
From there, I helped frame out the last wall, add hurricane-strapping throughout the house, and get ready for sheet-rock. After that I did lot of the trim and crown-mold throughout the house. Next, the boss and I built the hand rails and elegant faux ceilings on several balconies; built a set of deck-stairs and dozens of other small projects throughout the house. Near the end I put the real-wood facing onto the otherwise-ordinary garage-doors turning them into something special.
Relevant How?
One might wonder why I wanted to do construction, or how the experience is at all relevant to any other work I might do. As I noted in a blog-post, a number of parallels can actually be drawn between software-engineering and building a house.
Why I Wanted to do Construction:
- Take a break from the office to "recharge".
- Always wanted to pickup wood-working / carpentry as a hobby -
- ...Because it runs in the family.
How does this Apply to Software?
- It's all just "Design and Build".
- Builders have been doing multi-year and multi-million dollar projects far longer than software-developers.
- The project-management and people-management challenges are similar.
- Some days are "group-work", some days it's a "solo-project" but your still part of the team.
- The project life-cycle is similar: (design, model, foundation, outer-shell, inner-framework, detail-work, facade/interface, testing, debugging, maintenance...)
- It's all just Good Honest Hard Work, (Doing it outside it just hotter, colder, windier, wetter, dustier, dirtier, and all around more unpredictable)!
Time Again!
So I got to learn something about construction and carpentry! It's been a great experience but now I'm ready to go back to the computer world.
