Leaps and bounds

Life is strange. I remember thinking earlier this year that I probably needed an internship (although I'm a bit out of the age band) or something, because while I'd learned a lot on my own, I wasn't actually getting any experience on any collaborative tools (lookin' at you, git), and I was letting client work steer what I learned, and clients mostly didn't want to pay me to learn anything big. Before I decided I was done teaching, I thought about trying to find a summer internship, but I didn't ever follow through on that idea.

I thought about applying for junior developer jobs. I didn't do it. Applying for things is no fun, and I figured that I was likely to hit some amount of gender and age discrimination, and the market for junior developers is apparently really bad right now anyway. Why deal with that when you can freelance, right? And anyway, I had people beating down my door. (Still do. I really need to deal with my backlog.)

So anyway, back to present. It's been a whirlwind week. As I wrote previously, I got invited to revisit an old and stale PR for translations in Ghost's Portal app, which led to some work on fixing up the search app also. And suddenly I ended up in a channel with multiple folks from the Ghost core team, talking about modifying {{ghost_head}}, and whether there should be handlebars in the editor, and was the database going to catch fire. Wait, what?

I'm having the best time getting able to interact with the Ghost team. It's been great to get to ask questions when I'm stuck, and getting to discuss implementation of new features with them is a blast.

It's been an interesting revelation. I wouldn't have said that I was unhappy working alone, but getting to work with other developers (even remotely, and mostly asynchronously on Slack) is soooo much better. I hadn't realized how much. I need to figure out how to get more collaboration into my programming, because I'm loving it.

Also this week was the not-actually-going-away-but-no-longer-coming-to-work party thrown my former colleagues. I loved working with them, and no longer having an excuse to go out for coffee or wander in and out of each offices is one of the biggest things I'm going to miss about working there. They've been like family, and I miss seeing them every day. (But not enough to put up with further school-wide administrative nonsense and no one getting a raise in seven years and the whole character of the place changing for the worse....)

There'll be a separate post somewhere (probably on my other newsletter) about all the cool stuff I coded this week, but I'll just leave you with this nugget I dropped on the Ghost team's Slack channel:

Good news!  I resurrected the code I thought I'd accidentally blown away in a burst of git noobishness.  Bad news. I hate it – it's terrible. I've matured so much in the last three days.

And if you know any teams full of great people hiring a remote junior full stack-ish Javascript programmer, maybe let me know?