After four and a half years working for BioMed Central, I have decided it’s time to move on and try something new.

Quite what form of new that will be, I’m not entirely sure. One of the reasons for leaving is that the job took up so much head room that there really wasn’t any time left to think about other things. My trombone playing has suffered horribly over the past couple of years so this is a golden opportunity to put that right again. Also, it’s a good time to get in to some of the technologies and ideas that I didn’t have the chance to explore whilst working full time - either due to restrictions during the day or lack of energy to pursue outside work hours.

I’m certainly not going to retire from being a techie or turn this into some kind of musical retreat - concentrating only on one side I think would drive me nuts.

The idea of working for a consultancy does seem very appealing - primarily the breadth of experience gained by going in to many different organisations and working with many different people. Contracting also appeals for mostly the same reasons - there’s even the possibility of being able to take significant blocks of time out between contracts to help the life/work balance thing. For all that, though, the idea of starting up something of my own is most tempting.

So how about this for the perfect Christmas gift - why not buy the one you love some extraordinarily expensive IT consultancy? Nothing says you care more than getting someone in to tell them how to run their programming team… surely?

More seriously, come the new year I will be open to offers of work, both musically and technically. Drop me a line either through this site or to enquiries [at] odum.co.uk.