Robby Macdonell's profile answers

Dishwasher at Sbarro's in the mall. It was short-lived (3 days). Ah, high school. My first job that actually got held down for more than a week was as a stage-hand at 328 Performance Hall, a music venue in Nashville. It was fun work, the pay was good (for what it was) and I got to go to all the shows I wanted for free. I went from simply unloading the trucks and setting up equipment to eventually running lighting displays and managing a whole team of other stage-hands. I was there on and off for about 5 years....

My dream job was being self-employed, until I tried it. After being an independent designer for about 3 years, I realized I was completely overwhelmed with administration tasks, invoices, paying all the bills, doing complicated taxes, etc. Oh and not having health insurance for the whole time didn't help either. The amount of stuff that I learned was amazing, and I wouldn't do it any differently, but it 's not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. So at the moment, I'm dream job-less. Which I'm ok with, I have a lot of areas that I'm passionate about and I'm in no rush to narrow it down to just one thing....

I always kind of wanted to be a juggler or a cake-decorator. But I guess broadly speaking, something that is really creative but outside of the tech / visual media industry that I'm currently entrenched in.

I was largely in a production role at Hamilton-Hughes. I got to work with two wonderful designers (Bob & Kristen), doing the back-end and production work on several boutique web sites.

Variety is the blessing and the curse of working as an independent contractor. During the time I ran 1066 Propaganda I had to wear just about every hat imaginable at one point or another. In addition to design and development work on web applications, boutique websites, and multimedia CD-ROMS, I also was in charge of client relations and day-to-day administration aspects of the business....

At Jobster, I get to strike a really good balance between design and development. I work with a team of designers, usability experts, and product managers to create compelling user experiences in job search, profile / online resume creation, and social networking. On the development side, I do lots of front-end UI implementation in Ruby, XHTML, CSS, and Javascript...

My friend Kate used to work with Bob and Kristen, the owners of HHD, and she was always gushing about how great they were as people and designers, so when I heard they needed help in the web-geekery department, I went and talked to them. Kate was right, they're awesome people and insanely talented.

The best way to find a job. I started the company. :)
Honestly though, about a year ago I lost several months worth of blog posts and discussion when I changed hosting providers, because I forgot to up my databases, and I thought:
"I'm a pretty techically savvy guy, and I make mistakes like this, so it's likely a lot of other people do too. Shouldn't there be a way to dummy-proof this process a little bit?"
Then I was talking with my friend Jim about his having the same issues and we decided that we needed to do something about it. So, after a lot of research and late nights spent stumbling through a new programing language (Ruby), backupability was born....

There's a running list at last.fm
http://www.last.fm/user/1066propaganda/