Looking for someone with good FME skills in Denver-Boulder area

I seem to have had an unusually high number of "looking for ..." posts recently, but I was chatting with a local startup who is looking for someone with good FME skills in the Denver / Boulder area. Probably initially for a short contract assignment (asap) but with potential to become a longer term contract or permanent position. Let me know if you are interested or can recommend anyone!

Finally, the big decision on my next career move!

Well, after taking a couple of months off and spending the past couple of months exploring various options for my next career move, I have finally reached a decision. First, thanks for everyone who voted in my "going to the dark side" poll - I was honored that 474 votes were cast (though a few people admitted to voting multiple times!), with the final result (as of today) being:

• No, don't do it! - 231 votes (49%)
• Yes, it is your destiny! - 177 votes (37%)
• Don't know / don't care / who is Peter Batty? - 66 votes (14%)

You can check out the geographical distribution of the US votes at pollmappr. Who am I to go against the wishes of my loyal blog readers, so I have elected to rule out the "dark side" option (this time round at least :) !!). Also, thanks to everyone out there who I had discussions with about potential opportunities - I appreciate everyone taking the time and showing so much interest.

But after all that I have decided that I am going to go ahead and do my own startup, which I mentioned as a possibility in an earlier post looking for developers. I'm pleased to say that I got a number of responses to that post and have a couple of really good people signed up to start with, and a few others who might come on board as things move along. The new company is called Spatial Networking, and we will be focused on location related applications in the social networking space. I don't want to say too much more than that right now, but we will be looking to get our initial offering out in a few months, and I'll talk more about what we're up to as things move along. I'm excited about the opportunity in the space we're looking at, it should be a fun ride!

Incidentally, a couple of people asked me if I was looking for investors, and I will be at some point fairly soon - if you have any interest in finding out more when I get to that stage, feel free to email me.

Looking for some top notch web developers

I am still considering my next career move and have been talking to a number of established companies as well as bouncing around ideas for my own startup. I have recently focused in on what I think is a great idea for a startup, which includes aspects of social networking and location going in a direction where I haven't seen anyone else going yet, and I think it could take off really quickly.

So I'm looking around for a couple of top notch web developers who might be interested in getting involved in this. Preferably looking for people in the Denver area, but working remotely might be an option for the right person. Desirable experience / skills include the following (I'm not expecting all of these in one person):
- Ruby on Rails or Python (platform still TBD but these are probably the front runners)
- Building large scalable database applications
- Building large scalable web applications - experience with Amazon S3 and EC2 would be a plus
- AJAX
- Great user interface design and development
- PostgreSQL and/or PostGIS (though again, platform still TBD)
- Development of social networking applications (including the Facebook Platform)
- Experience with online mapping development (Google, Microsoft, etc) a plus but less important than other things on the list

If you have any interest, please get in touch! And again, there is the caveat that this may or may not happen - but finding the right people would be a big vote in favor of going this way. I think this is an opportunity to develop something very cool, have a lot of fun and make some good money (down the line)!