One advantage of not being a permanent employee is that I am free to do paid work for other people. This not only gives a greater income but also a wider scope of work.
I’ve just completed my first significant project since leaving Red Hat. The Inumbers project provides an email address for every mobile phone. If you know someone’s mobile phone number but don’t have an email address then you can send email to NNN@inumbers.com where NNN is the international format mobile phone number. The recipient will receive an SMS advising them how to sign up and collect the email.
It was fun work, I had to learn how to implement SRS (which I had been meaning to do for a few years), write scripts to interface with a bulk SMS service, and do a few other things that were new to me.