Stalemate

I am living in a hostel working from my bed. There is no suitable place to sit and work. Not much space in room that I could buy a small office setup (aka a chair and table; I actually bought them but had to return ‘cause I couldn't place them anywhere). Working from bed is a disaster, but somehow it worked fine for 3 months or so.

I live in my head. Food for mind is important for me. With James, I've mostly worked in Javascript and Meteor.js. When he first contacted me, my JavaScript was same as my French. I don't know French. It was a fun ride. I learned a hell lot of stuff. Besides learning JavaScript and meteor, I got the opportunity to manage AWS instances, tweaking npm modules, setting up Mongo replicas, fixing Mysql servers, RoR apps (at one instance) and many more. It was all super cool. But for past couple months, I am not getting any food. I've been working on a very interesting project (a collaborative development tool that aims to make the web writeable). But I feel like I am not learning anything new. I am feeling like I am not growing. For last 3 months (since I moved to Bangalore) I've been constantly working for 8 hours a day, sometimes working on weekends too.

Although I managed to teach myself Objective-C (out of foolish fear that it might extinct before I could learn it) and Angular.js (I learned this when I was teaching it to my girlfriend who wanted to make a phonegap app; she got a job at Intel with that), but I don't think it's worth even mentioning them. They were easy and I haven't mastered any of these. IMO mastering anything without investing substantial amount of time actually working in it is not possible.

I am loner to be honest. I despise company. This is festival season in India, my roommates are gone to their homes. I can't be happier. But it's not true when I am coding. I like company there. For about a month I worked along with James Gillmore. He's like 10X smarter than I am. I loved every moment of it even though for about a week we were working may be 18 hours a day. I didn't exactly logged any hours, but I remember all I did for may be a week was eat, sleep and code. Literally. I loved it and still cherish the memory.

But for last 4 or so months, I am working all alone. I've brought meteor-only version of nucleus to a level where we can start using it (internally), but I haven't even launched it yet.

I find myself caught in a Limbo. I don't know if that's the word to use here, I learned it from a blog post I read couple days ago (about Ubisoft doing funny things with its employees). I am not working for reasons unknown to me, and I am not doing anything else because I have unfinished work to do. I have spent days just staring at my computer's screen, not moving a finger.

My gut feeling says I should stick. But probably I should quit and find myself work elsewhere on the interwebs. I really don't want to work in a shitty development shop. Big companies won't take me because I don't have any experience on paper. A freelancer friend (yes I made a friend in new place) warned me that it's not that easy for un-established Indian freelancers to find work. Apparently the law of averages rule the Internet. With the vast number of Indian developers lurking around the Internet and the quality of most of them, averages are certainly not in my favour. Personally I don't want to quit. Reasons being I want to finish what I've started, for the sake of it.

And I don't really have any savings to survive without work for more than a couple weeks. But if I can't produce results.