Entries tagged 'life'

I took this photo back in 2005 of a building at 3rd and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles as it was just starting to be converted into residential lofts. Gutted, full of promise, and destined for better things. I can relate.

A disheartening thing about the job market right now is that it feels very stagnant, and I find myself coming across job listings that I skipped over earlier because it fell outside of the parameters I really need or want, but decide it’s time to just go ahead and apply to it and see what happens.

And then I notice that I actually did apply to it some weeks or months ago, and just never heard anything back.

I interviewed with a company recently that ended up deciding to not hire anyone right now. I am grateful to have gone through the process at least, just getting to flex that muscle of talking to interviewers and doing some technical exercises.

I continue to apply for other positions, riding that rollercoaster, and still somehow retaining some sense of optimism that the right opportunity is around the next bend.

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.)

just over seven years ago, i mentioned that i had decided to switch over to using scat, the point of sale software that i had been knocking together in my spare time. it happened, and we have been using it while i continue to work on it in that copious spare time. the project page says “it is currently a very rough work-in-progress and not suitable for use by anyone.” and that's still true. perhaps even more true. (and absolutely true if you include the online store component.)

it is currently a frankenstein monster as i am (slowly) transforming it from an old-school php application to being built on the slim framework. i am using twig for templating, and using idiorm and paris as a database abstraction thing.

i am using docker containers for some things, but i have very mixed emotions about it. i started doing that because i was doing development on my macbook pro (15-inch early 2008) which is stuck on el capitan, but found it convenient to keep using them once i transitioned to doing development on the same local server where i'm running our production instance.

the way that docker gets stdout and stderr wrong constantly vexes me. (there may be reasonable technical reasons for it.)

i have been reading jamie zawinski’s blog for a very long time. all the way back to when it was on live journal, and also the blog for dna lounge, the nightclub he owns. the most recent post about writing his own user account system to the club website sounded very familiar.

the new york times has an article about how the fast pace of innovation is creating mini-generations.

while the story focuses on the users of all these technologies, the part of it that is of more immediate interest to me is the makers, since i’m one of them. the craft of making computers do what you want is progressing at least as fast as their uses.

new languages, new techniques, new environments. there are people who stand aside and laugh at the reinvention they see, but i would not count myself among them. there are people in the thick of it that think the current new thing is the one that will change everything. i am not one of them, either. there are people who get caught up in an eddy, where what was once the new thing has become their only thing. they are the next generation’s cobol programmer.

i think i am becoming one of them. i don’t think i mind. i don’t code in my free time any longer. i am moving on in other ways. my value as a programmer is not in knowing the newest things.