One More Week

It was another full day grinding away at my job at a country club, one of just a few left in my career. A week from today, I will have my last day as a golf professional and, nine days from now, I will start my career as a software developer. Given this is the busiest time of the year for us, it has been absolutely crazy at work. We are setting up multiple tournaments and mainly getting ready for the big tournament starting on Thursday, the Member-Guest Invitational. This would be much easier to focus on if I didn't have the job of taking care of the rest of the day-to-day operations at the club. There are clubs where there is just a tournament director who spends his or her days preparing and running tournaments and nothing else. Up until this job, I didn't understand the importance of this position, but I now see how this could be a full time position. There is so much that goes into preparing and running a tournament; we start getting ready for a tournament like the Member-Guest weeks in advance and, as we get closer to the start of the tournament, the amount of work ramps up. There's still a ton we have to do before the tournament, all the while we are having our busiest days of the year. By the time I get home from work, I'm completely spent.

Word is slowly getting out to the membership that I'm on my last week, and I spend a lot of my days at work having difficult conversations with the members. They are mostly sad to see me go and supportive of the move to a better position, and understand how unrewarding it is to be a golf professional. I have made a lot of friends during my time at this club with members, and in a lot of ways I'll be sad to see them go. At the same time, I'm so excited for what the future will hold. In the golf business, it was going to be years before I was in a position where I could live on a comfortable salary, and the climb to the top was going to be arduous. Putting that aside, I would be spending my days being unhappy with my profession and, frankly, bored. A big part of why I wanted to change careers is that I wasn't getting mentally stimulated in the golf business and every day was just like the last. My new career holds a lot of promise and will be a constant learning experience. It will be challenging, but that's exactly what I'm looking for. I'm going to be surrounded by incredibly intelligent individuals who enjoy learning, which is certainly the antithesis of the golf industry.

Once I got situated at home and was able to get some work done, I got about an hour or so into Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy before I fell asleep at the computer. Like I said, I'm completely exhausted and just trudging through this last week and a half at my job. It will be a miracle when I make it to next Saturday and I can't wait. I only have about 2 or 3 more hours left in this course, if that, and then I can move my attention over to the JavaScript course I started last week by Andrew. In the current section, we are discussing testing with GraphQL, which I am incredibly bored with. Testing is really important in software development, and almost every job description has some sort of testing background listed as a requirement. But, for me, it's like watching paint dry. I feel like, once I've written some code, the last thing I want to do is pore over that code for hours and catch any mistakes in it. I know how important it is, but would rather have someone else do this tedious job. I have to get over that mindset, given I will be doing some serious testing throughout my career, but it is a struggle to make myself be interested in it. In this course, we are using Jest as a testing suite for our project, which I've used with other projects in the past. Jest is really nice, and works well, but it's still just so boring to me. Luckily, I just have a few more lessons to go in this section before I can put it to bed, but it keeps putting me to bed before I can finish it.

Until tomorrow!