April, 1, 2024 archives
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
I’m still looking for a job.
It is a new month, so I thought it was a good time to raise this flag again, despite it being a bad day to try and be honest and earnest on the internet.
I wish I was the sort of organized that allowed me to run down statistics of how many jobs I have applied to and how many interviews I have gone through other than to say it has been a lot and very few.
Last month I decided to start (re)developing my Python skills because that seems to be much more in demand than the PHP skills I can more obviously lay claim to. I made some contributions to an open source project, ArchiveBox: improving the importing tools, writing tests, and updating it to the latest LTS version of Django from the very old version it was stuck on. I also started putting together a Python library/tool to create a single-file version of an HTML file by pulling in required external resources and in-lining them; my way of learning more about the Python culture and ecosystem.
That and attending SCALE 21x really did help me realize how much I want to be back in the open source development space. I am certainly not dogmatic about it, but I believe to my bones that operating in a community is the best way to develop software.
I think my focus this month has to be on preparing for the “technical interview” exercises that are such a big of the tech hiring process these days, as much as I hate it. I think what makes me a valuable senior engineer is not that I can whip up code on demand for data structures and algorithms, but that I know how to put systems together, have a broader business experience that means I have a deeper of understanding of what matters, and can communicate well. But these tests seem to be an accepted and expected component of the interview process now, so it only makes sense to polish those skills.
(Every day this drags on, I regret my detour into opening a small business more. That debt is going to be a drag on the rest of my life, compounded by the huge weird hole it puts in my résumé.)