Thank you, blog
Hey hey,
Today I'm writing a small post to thank my blog (and circuitously myself, I suppose) for helping me find work I'm interested in doing.
I started a new job last week at a software consultancy. The consultancy places consultants at different clients in pairs or small groups. The clients could have any range of challenges or technical problems, using any variety of languages/tech stacks. And so, when joining, the consultancy tries to find a best fit between the consultant and client based on technology and interest.
When trying to find the right client for me, my colleague-to-be told me that some other internal employees had noticed I was writing about Elixir on my site and was doing it for fun. This lead to a proposed client that used Elixir for my first placement. To this, I enthusiastically said yes. I had thought that I would end up joining the company and working in primarily JavaScript for my first client, where most of my working experience is. I imagined I would have to bide my time for an Elixir contract, as well as to prove that I was proficient in Elixir in order to be considered.
Perhaps the stars had simply aligned. Indeed, I am lucky and privileged in many ways. But I also want to be proud of the things I have had some control over, like pushing myself out of my comfort zone to be in a place where I'm writing publicly about my learning, my failures and my successes. Often, I look back at the things I've written with some embarrassment (it will take some time & effort for this to pass, I think) and so it's nice to see the positive side of doing this.
Speaking of learning - I am already learning a lot. There's a big difference from a side-project codebase and a workplace codebase (but perhaps you and I both know that, dear reader?). I'm already learning a lot, and there is so much more to come. I'll write more about that in a future post.
To the folks who come and read these posts - thank you! Whether you are someone who advocated for me, or you've never met me - thank you for being here and reading along.
o/
WT