tl;dr:
This website will act as my personal playground for vetting out techniques and patterns. As I continue to build out this site, I’ll blog about how I did it and my thought processes behind doing so.
Losing your job sucks in today’s economy
Last month I was downsized. In the past, I’ve never had a problem finding the next role fairly quickly. In fact, my wife Amber didn’t worry until a couple of weeks into afterwards.
I have applied to about a dozen companies. It reminds me of what it felt like when I was single and dating. Now that I’m in my mid-40s, I do tend to approach interviewing differently than I had in years past. When I was younger, I’d date anyone who would agree to go out with me. Similarly, I used to take any job that sounded like they needed me. That approach transitioned about 8ish years ago. As my confidence and skills grew, I saw job interviews almost like a real date. I need to be attracted to them as well.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve “dated” a handful of companies. Some of them really liked me, but I didn’t see a future there. I was twitterpated with a couple of other companies, but they decided I wasn’t what they wanted. With one company, I even spent about 40 hours trying to fix what I believe is an unfixable bug (fiber-based) only to be turned down afterwards.
I don’t hold any grudge against anyone, but it has taken a huge toll on my confidence. I got to the point where I was asking myself if I’m in the right career.
I read an article the other day by @dhh entitled Developers are on edge. His first paragraph summed up my experience since being downsized. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s a double whammy of anxiety for developers at the moment. On the one hand, the layoffs are dragging on. The industry has shed more jobs in a shorter period than any time since the dot-com bust over twenty years ago. Seasoned veterans who used to have recruiters banging on their door nonstop can suddenly barely get a callback.
- David Heinemeier Hansson
It was comforting to me that I wasn’t alone in this struggle. It also helped me recognize that I needed to adapt, and adapt fast.
Going back to my roots
Like many developers learning Rails back then, my favorite way to learn was by watching Railscasts by Ryan Bates. I remember thinking “that guy really knows his stuff.” I wanted to be like him, so I started a screencast series called “Teach me to code”. This didn’t last too long (maybe a dozen videos), but I learned something while doing so, which is, I learn the best when I’m teaching others.
There is no better way to learn than to teach.
- Nobel laureate physicist Robert Oppenheimer
I’ve always felt I was a pretty damn good programmer, but never a great one. This may be due having worked together for 13+ years with the brilliant Nate Hopkins (@hopsoft). Nate has always been my mentor and can code circles around me. He is literally one of the best Ruby engineers out there. I believe most engineers would feel the same.
Nate has become one of the most listened to voices when it comes to “HTML over the wire”. He has openly built Ruby gems such as stimulus_reflex, cable_ready, turbo_boost-commands, turbo_boost-streams, universalid, and tons more that you probably have never heard of.
Learn with me
I know there was a lot of back story just to get to the point of this article. Thanks for sticking with me.
This website (berry.sh) will act as my personal playground for vetting out web development concepts and patterns. I plan to teach how to implement changes to this website and provide a rich learning experience using some killer techniques
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