A New Beginning

Today was officially my last day as a golf professional. I will be unemployed for a total of 41 hours and start my career as a software developer on Monday at 8 AM. I could have chosen to give myself a little more time in between jobs, but I'm so excited to start this new life, I couldn't wait any longer. In fact, when I agreed to take the position, I let them know I would need to stay through this big tournament we had this week at the club, the Member-Guest Invitational, which was actually nearly three weeks after I accepted the offer. I would not have felt good leaving my guys high and dry right before this tournament, and it would have put them in a really bad spot. As it is, I still feel really guilty leaving them with a good chunk of the season left to go, and I think it will be a difficult couple of months for them. Once they get to May, they should be fine, but the next two months are going to be really rough for them. They won't have many days off and will work long hours, but they should also get a fair amount of overtime and will be compensated appropriately for their hard work. Nonetheless, I hate leaving them in the middle of the season, but it's important I get the clock rolling for experience so new doors can open up in the future sooner rather than later.

Am I going into this new job feeling confident and without any doubts? Hell no. Like anyone starting a career in software development or similar fields, I'm having all kinds of feelings that could be described as imposter syndrome. I keep thinking I will be tested by my team immediately to see how smart I actually am and what I actually know, and I won't have the answers they are expecting. I know this probably won't be the way things go, and I'm sure they will be more than happy to train me up on everything I don't know, but imposter syndrome is real. If you're not familiar with the term, it's when you think you aren't good enough at what you do to be there. We all have knowledge gaps, and people new to the field like me have more than others, but I have a lot of knowledge they might not know anything about, like React and Gatsby, or even GraphQL. They may know more about the backend, or the nuances of CSS, but I know more about other areas they aren't as versed in. Still, I want to feel free to be able to ask questions and get the answers I need to be able to grow my skillset, and that comes from having a good team that is open to helping each other. Truthfully, I have no idea what I'm coming into as far as the team goes, and it may not work out that way. If that's the case, I've learned how to teach myself, and I will continue to do so while racking up the necessary experience I need to move forward in this industry. In a year's time, or whatever it might be, I'll be ready to make that next move to a much better position than the one I'm going into, and so on from there.

As for today, the show goes on. It may have been my last day of work, and most normal people would celebrate this in some way, but I have created my regimen and am sticking to it. I was able to get out of work at 3 today because my fiancé had to work at 4, so I had to be home with the little girl. We hung out, me and the little one, for a few hours, I fed her, threw her in the bath, and got her ready for bed. After that, I sat down to get some work done, but I kept it pretty short tonight, as I have most of this week. It's been a really difficult week of work, and my brain is fried, so I didn't have much to give. I continued my work on Andrew Mead's The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp on Udemy, finishing up the section on using JavaScript in the browser, which turned out to be a fantastic section of material. This really cleared up a lot of questions and knowledge gaps I had in this area, and also made it more clear what areas in this realm I needed to work on. I think I could get a lot value in actually going back through this section again when my brain is working a little better, but an even better option would be to work on Wes Bos' JavaScript 30, where he focuses almost solely on this area of JavaScript. Wes Bos is a great teacher, and I listen to him and Scott Tolinski's podcast, Syntax, all the time. I've done several of the challenges in this course already, but I would like to finish it up in the near future, maybe after I finish up this course. We will see what they throw at me in the first week and where I think I should be spending my time.

Until tomorrow!