Personal

I’ve been pretty quiet about my work life lately. But spoiler alert, I have a job (and have been at it for the last 3 months)! If you spoke to me earlier this year or read a previous post about my job search, you’d have heard that the journey to a job post layoff for me was an emotional rollercoaster. Interviewing was not a strength of mine. I spent months getting wooed by companies impressed by my resume only to get rejected after yet another failed technical. It was horrifyingly depressing. But just as I was starting to lose steam, I got my break and landed a dream role, in the most unexpected (but unsurprising) of ways—in person, at a conference. ...

A few years ago, I received news of a professor’s passing in the most bizarrely impersonal way we tend to receive news these days: via a twitter mention from a college ex I hadn’t spoken to in years. The memorial service was set for that weekend in Central Massachusetts where he and his family lived. At the time, I was living in Cambridge, which was just a short train ride away. But I never made it past Back Bay. ...

I got laid off for the first time back in September (surprise!) and it took a giant toll on me emotionally. For the last 10 or so years I’d managed to muscle my way through engineering jobs despite not having a formal degree in CS. I’ve had the immense privilege of working at some really cool companies, working my way from the front of the frontend through the bowels of the stack and (for a brief moment) into the cold heart of bare metal. I’ve worked on product, systems, support tooling, growth/sales pipelines, billing, and miscellaneous developer workflows. In that time, I’ve written code in Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Golang, Elixir and (some) Rust and worked with some crazy intelligent people. I’ve given talks internationally and written blog posts about various deeply technical pursuits. While I’m by no means an expert at all or many of things, I share this to say that I have a chunk of experience under my belt. ...