It sounds like you're mostly fed up with dealing with management and that you've decided in your mind that its not possible to find a place without clueless management. Considering just how in-demand developers are right now, I'd encourage you to look around. When you are interviewed, interview _them_ and get a good feeling for what the management is really like. There are certainly places that don't have clueless management.
My feeling (as an entrepreneur, and someone who struggles with this a lot) is that you're more likely to find that in a smaller company (where you get more say over the final product). Maybe at a startup that's well funded and has been around a couple years. Or just a small-medium business. There's also consulting and longer-term contracts. These days you really do have a LOT of options if you're a good developer. If there's not much in your area, consider remote work. Or starting a startup on the side (follow Hacker News religiously if so -- see news.ycombinator.com).
In short, call your headhunter (http://bartoszmilewski.com/2012/02/06/call-your-headhunter/).
If you actually _are_ tired of coding itself, that's an entirely different conversation.
I built one of these with an old dish a while back and was surprised how well it worked. I used it as a cheap proof-of-concept antenna for a 0.7 mile point to point wireless link and connected it to my laptop and NetStumbler to test signal strength. Fun project Pete
We are in the similar situation having Exchange in-house behind a (quite stable) DSL line. Thankfully the DSL has been out only about 30 minutes total in our first year, but unfortunately our Exchange server can't say the same. We've gotten an amazing value using a backup mx service, which silently queues mail for us until our server returns. It works amazingly well-- once our server is back up, the queued mail comes flowing in. Its a beautiful thing.
We specifically use EasyDNS's DNS service which includes the backup MX service. We use their DNS Plus service which only costs about $40/year, and allows us to use their CLUSTER of backup MX servers (How cool is that!?)! Its also available on their DNS-only service (~$20/yr). I don't work for EasyDNS (just a happy customer). You can also get the same service from lots of otherplaces as well.
Realistically, I think you need to use an external DNS service to do this for network outages (since other mail servers will need access to your domain's MX records to find to the backup MX servers). For us, this meant we needed to use a different DNS server inside our local network. The external dns points people to our mail server's public IP. The internal dns points to our internal ips.
Another note, we use PFSense as our firewall (great product!). Recently, I think I saw support for NAT Reflection was added (allowing internal machines to contact internal servers using a public IP address), which might negate the need for the "split" dns described above. Haven't tried that yet, though.
I've been playing around with the Typo3 CMS lately, its really pretty amazing. It can do some pretty impressive dynamic graphics generation, especially in terms of graphical navigation menus and rescaling and optimization of images. I've made a couple dynamic sites with it and it has proved to be very well thought out and extremely well documented (IMHO).
Some really cool features: (Stolen directly from typo3.com)
Navigational menus are automatically created - even if the menu is made graphically - perhaps even with background-images, dropshadows on text and roll-over effects!
Images uploaded and used on pages are automatically scaled to the correct size (no HTML-scaling!) and stored on the server with a minimum filesize. Even non-web image-formats can be used! (TIF, AI, PDF, PCX and more). And you can without further knowledge just upload your digital-camera pictures and they'll be scaled automatically.
Headlines and other graphical elements with shifting content is also automatically generated.
You can differenciate the website-design by creating variations in the templates based on the client browser, IP-number or number-range, operating system, countrycodes, userchosen parameters eg. printing-friendly versions of no-frames versions.You can have multiple templates on a site.
Pages can be timed to be shown on a certain date, be hidden on a certain date or just temporarily hidden.
Typo3 has a build-in password-protecting option on the pages. Thereby protected pages are only visible for users from a certain usergroup.
Typo3 supports search in SQL-databases.
Redesigning of a website at once is a question of creating one single new template.
I've started to use it for a couple sites in the last six months, and its really made web development fun.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you're mostly fed up with dealing with management and that you've decided in your mind that its not possible to find a place without clueless management. Considering just how in-demand developers are right now, I'd encourage you to look around. When you are interviewed, interview _them_ and get a good feeling for what the management is really like. There are certainly places that don't have clueless management.
My feeling (as an entrepreneur, and someone who struggles with this a lot) is that you're more likely to find that in a smaller company (where you get more say over the final product). Maybe at a startup that's well funded and has been around a couple years. Or just a small-medium business. There's also consulting and longer-term contracts. These days you really do have a LOT of options if you're a good developer. If there's not much in your area, consider remote work. Or starting a startup on the side (follow Hacker News religiously if so -- see news.ycombinator.com).
In short, call your headhunter (http://bartoszmilewski.com/2012/02/06/call-your-headhunter/).
If you actually _are_ tired of coding itself, that's an entirely different conversation.
And once you create this competition, I will be the first to sign up for your cheaper, unlimited bandwidth.
If you're in a 4G Sprint market, you can get an HTC Evo with unlimited 4G bandwidth starting on Friday.
I built one of these with an old dish a while back and was surprised how well it worked. I used it as a cheap proof-of-concept antenna for a 0.7 mile point to point wireless link and connected it to my laptop and NetStumbler to test signal strength. Fun project
Pete
We are in the similar situation having Exchange in-house behind a (quite stable) DSL line. Thankfully the DSL has been out only about 30 minutes total in our first year, but unfortunately our Exchange server can't say the same. We've gotten an amazing value using a backup mx service, which silently queues mail for us until our server returns. It works amazingly well-- once our server is back up, the queued mail comes flowing in. Its a beautiful thing.
We specifically use EasyDNS's DNS service which includes the backup MX service. We use their DNS Plus service which only costs about $40/year, and allows us to use their CLUSTER of backup MX servers (How cool is that!?)! Its also available on their DNS-only service (~$20/yr). I don't work for EasyDNS (just a happy customer). You can also get the same service from lots of other places as well.
Realistically, I think you need to use an external DNS service to do this for network outages (since other mail servers will need access to your domain's MX records to find to the backup MX servers). For us, this meant we needed to use a different DNS server inside our local network. The external dns points people to our mail server's public IP. The internal dns points to our internal ips.
Another note, we use PFSense as our firewall (great product!). Recently, I think I saw support for NAT Reflection was added (allowing internal machines to contact internal servers using a public IP address), which might negate the need for the "split" dns described above. Haven't tried that yet, though.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
www.typo3.com
Some really cool features: (Stolen directly from typo3.com) I've started to use it for a couple sites in the last six months, and its really made web development fun.
-Pete