"Free" as in Freelance
Jose Cruz
Employer: Self-employed
Job: Freelance engineer and consultant
DDJ: What do you like about your job?
JC: What I like about it is that it enables me to explore areas of Mac OS X development I was unable to explore when I worked as a full-time software engineer. I get a lot of opportunities to experiment with new technologies and learn new things.
DDJ: What do you find most challenging about your job?
JC: Basically just keeping ahead of the game. Computer technology is simply changing faster than it used to.
DDJ: In moving from a full-time employee to a consultant, what were the biggest challenges you faced?
JC: Just trying to find and develop my small line of clientele. I suppose a lot of it is trying to convince them why I became a consultant.
DDJ: A lot of what you've been doing right now is Macintosh based. Are you finding much interest amongst your clientele with the move to the Intel platform and the Boot Camp proposal from Microsoft?
JC: Yes, [but] it's not just Intel Macs booting Windows [that they're interested in], but also other things like Linux and other flavors of UNIX, such as BSD.