Long Week

Well, it's been an interesting week. It started off last Friday with a thought to reach out to a company who had tendered an offer back in December. I had initially turned the offer down due to the terms, but after 2 months of completely striking out, I thought it was time to return with my tail in between my legs and see if they still had a spot for me. To my surprise, they promptly got back to me on Monday wanting to set something up the next day. After getting into an argument with my boss on Tuesday over a communication issue, I was at my breaking point at my current job and walked into the meeting wanting nothing more than to sign on the dotted line. After 3 years of working at this country club, it was time to move on and start the next chapter in my life. I've been studying for more than 9 months now to get to where I am today, and it's been a long and arduous road. This is not the finish line; it's more like I've finally arrived at the starting line after months of training. I've been practicing and studying for this moment for quite a while now, but I still don't feel ready. This feeling, though, is well documented by software developers across the board, and is known as imposter syndrome. All I can hope for is a team who is more than willing to train me up and get me to a professional level of software engineering.

After this meeting, I went into 2 straight days of intense work. Yesterday was our monthly blowout tournament at the club, and I didn't get home until after 7:30. Today, I worked 10 and a half hours, ran a ladies' tournament, and prepared for one of our major tournaments that will be held tomorrow and Saturday. It was a hell of a day, one where I didn't stop working the entire day and still didn't get half of what I wanted to get done completed. I left the guys in great shape for the tournament tomorrow, but could have easily spent another 2 or 3 hours at work to get to a point where I felt satisfied. I can say that, while I can't transfer any technical skills from this job or any others I've worked in the past, my professional skills have been refined in the last 5 to 10 years to a level of world class, in my opinion. My work ethic is unparalleled, I can deal with all sorts of people and personalities, and I can lead a team to great outcomes. These skills are difficult to advertise when looking for the types of jobs I've been looking for in the pursuit of my first software development position, but they will become more and more important as I move up in the world. Eventually, I will be asked to lead a team of engineers, and I suspect this will be a role I feel right at home with. That position is well in the future, but if I can apply my work ethic to achieving this end, it will come sooner than later and will pay off tremendously.

I continued on in a limited capacity with Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy after getting my munchkin down for bed, but I just didn't have much in the tank to give. I got about an hour and a half in, but I hit the wall pretty quickly. We are going over adding passwords to our users and hashing these passwords into JSON Web Tokens with the help of a couple of NPM packages. The process is fairly straightforward with the help of Prisma and GraphQL, but it's still pretty advanced and beyond my cognitive capacity. I'm conflicted right now, as I love this course and want to finish it, since I'm on the home stretch, with less than 10 hours to go, while at the same time, I should be turning my attention towards going deep on JavaScript, HTML and CSS so I'm the most prepared for my first day. As I said yesterday, I love GraphQL and really want to master it, but I won't be using in my everyday work practices, so most of what I'm learning, I won't have time to retain in the long run. If I can bang this course out in the next 2 days, that would be awesome, as I could at least add it to my repertoire of coursework, even though it's not going to be retained. When I write it out, that sounds pretty dumb. I think it's time to turn my attention to going full on with JavaScript. Andrew has a great looking course on JavaScript, so I think I'll turn my attention to that instead of finishing up this course, or go back and forth until I do finish it. Either way, I will have plenty to do before starting my job on March 9th.

Until tomorrow!