I'm Saying There's a Chance

I have to admit, I've been a little down in the dumps the last week and a half after making a very difficult decision and then second-guessing it. I've talked about it several times in this blog, but I turned down a job offer as a software developer at a local company. The offer they gave me was, at the end of the day, just not sufficient for my family and I, and while there were some great things about the job, the feeling of being completely undervalued cut deep. After turning down the job, I immediately felt like I had made the wrong decision. While the pay may not have been very good, at least I would have been getting some very valuable experience, and the job was really close to home. It didn't help that I went from having 4 interviews the week of the job offer to getting zero last week. It made me feel as though I may not get another chance at a job for a while, and I would be stuck in the wrong occupation for longer than I wanted. This may still hold true, but I might have just caught a break.

The week of receiving that offer, I took 2 different coding tests, one with a company in Fort Myers, Florida, and one in Austin, Texas. I also interviewed with the company in Austin, and thought the interview went really well. I got along with the interviewer really well, and was able to talk to him on a very human level. The interview wasn't in any way technical, but he informed me if I got through the coding test, I would be given more of an extensive technical interview. I didn't hear back from either of these companies at all last week, so I figured I didn't do as well as I might want on the coding tests, and pretty much gave up hope. I had a dream last night that the company in Austin reached back out to me, and lo and behold, I received an email today inviting me to interview. The interview will be held next Monday, December 23rd, and will last approximately an hour. All I know at this point is that about 15 minutes of this interview will be spent reviewing my portfolio and Github projects, which I'm more than comfortable with. The rest of the time has not been disclosed, but I do know there will be 3 people interviewing me in total. My suspicions are that some of this time will be spent seeing if I'm a good cultural fit for the company and some of it will be spent testing my technical skills and communication. I couldn't think of a better time to do this, since I will just be wrapping up my 2 week CS Prep course, in which we work on exactly those skills.

I have 2 more official classes of CS Prep, today and Saturday. Monday is supposed to be some kind of group presentation of a project we'll be given on Saturday afternoon. Today is meant to be a review course, and it's been suggested that we will work on a variety of topics, including the reduce HOF and the prototype chain. Saturday will be spent discussing closure, which is one of my favorite topics in Will Sentance's courses. Will uses the analogy of a function having a little backpack that it carries along into it's function-level execution context. Meaning, within the outer scope of the function, it has access to all of those variables within the new execution context. It's a really interesting and useful concept that wasn't really completely possible until ES6 came out, and it's often easily confused. But, as always, the way Will explains it clears all the confusion right up and makes it into a really simple concept.

Until Tomorrow!