I haven't posted in ages; come work with me

1. It’s been a really long time since I posted last.

2. If you’re a skilled Web programmer with an interest in news sites, you should apply to work with me.

Let me explain how those two thoughts are related by telling a little story.

When I first started working at TCPalm.com, the site was frankly just awful. The home page was a collage of disorganized distracting graphics, the CMS was stripping certain punctuation marks out of news stories, and worst of all, no one else was really devoting any energy toward fixing those kinds of problems. I was frustrated about work a lot. During this period, blogging, not work, was my outlet for dreaming up off-the-wall ideas about what the perfect news site would be like.

Then a funny thing happened. Several people left. I ended up in charge. This took several months of getting used to. At first I still regularly complained about our problems to anyone who would listen. Then I realized that the only thing standing in the way of fixing the problems was my own attitude about them. Rather than debating whether the organizational culture here would permit doing certain things, it was time to make the organizational culture more enlightened. As I made progress on that, complaining about things in the blog no longer felt like the most effective way I could make the world better. Projects at work started becoming the main creative outlet for my whole heart and soul. And they’ve been really rewarding.

That’s the reason I think you should come work here: Our culture has changed enough that we are specifically adding a position for someone who will “give the users the content they want, and the interface they need.”

I hope you won’t be scared off by the fact that we’re small, or that there are still many, many ways in which we aren’t yet doing what we know we need to be doing. If you agree with our first principles and if you’re willing to view the glass as half full, your energy and your skill are going to help make it three-quarters full.

If you know your programming languages and this sounds intriguing, read the job description, apply, and come help us do great things (or at least give me a teeny bit of free time to blog again).