So there I was.
I joked that programming is like the dark side of career paths. Its tempting to do because it looks fun from the outside. It would have been a nice change from pushing paper and excel spreadsheets to vendors about why X does not adhere to standard Y. To be able to go to ‘work’, and that ‘work’ means somewhere near civilisation. The concept is amazingly tempting, yet fraught with risk.
As I write this, I’ve been working at TFG for the past 9 months! I have various things to say but my work here has been very fruitful.
The majority of my time has been spent looking at the data analytics work that I was originally signed up to do. During slower times, however, I have been encouraged to help out with the others in developing web apps just like I hoped!
I have one current project in production, and another still in staging. I’ve had experience in the following technologies, languages and frameworks:
I’ve had to pick up a smattering of things, not limited to databases, ORMs, Continuous Integration tools or deployment tools.
In my spare time I’ve continued to learn at a fast pace and have touched on the following things:
I’ve even helped drive change in the stack that is used! React.js and webpack specifically. Before it was browserify and react-rails/coffeescript, but obsessive tendency to stay on the cutting edge and research the latest and greatest tooling has managed to see us enter a new era for javascript.
I like to think that it is currently the ‘golden age’ for javascript, mostly because of node as I’m sure you’re aware of. I’m glad to be in the industry now, and not 5 or 10 years ago where you’d be hacking away with LAMP and jquery. Or Silverlight. Or Java applets.
That’s the story so far anyway. I’ll update this every now and then to see my present thoughts at the time regarding my career change choice. But for now I am still optimistic and hopeful. At this point I feel that the future will continue to see me learn new things, be challenged and do things that I actually want to do.
Finance notwithstanding of course. I’m about to lock in a large mortgage so I have been feeling the urge to return to engineering for the extra money. Let’s not hope it comes to that.