Oh, hello
Oh, hello. Wow, it’s been four years since I've last blogged. I promise it has nothing to do with the Trump presidency. While that was certainly… distracting, what’s mostly been keeping me away is that I’ve busy been hacking away at a new career.
When I last wrote I had recently come back from Berlin and was on the job hunt. Money was pretty tight, as I hadn’t been been working while over there [1]. When not galavanting, I was spending most of my time coding up little projects to fill out my GitHub and building a portfolio to show off to prospective employers. I remember one project in particular, I built it to alert me as to when an appointment opening showed up at some local government office. One thing about Germany, and the EU in general, I guess, is that there are a bunch of regulations, and thus hoops you have to jump through to do anything. In my case I had to register at this office to say that I was living in Germany for a while. The process is called the Anmeldung. I don’t know exactly what the point was, because I didn’t end up using this registration for anything, but I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the law if anything did come up [2]. Anyway, for whatever reason it was impossible to get an appointment on the website, as any openings that appeared were quickly booked by other people. So I built a little web scraper in Ruby that would run periodically, check the contents of the webpage for an error message (“Zeit gibt es keine Termine” [3]) or a 429 error [4], and if neither of those were present then that meant there was an appointment available somewhere in my area. At that point a noise would go off, signalling me to hop onto the site and manually make a booking (though if that proved impossible my next step would have been to automate that as well.) Simpler days.
Fast forward four years, and here we are. Here’s the quick version:
After getting back to Canada, I split my time between building out more side projects (anyone want a weather app?) and applying to junior web developer jobs. Eventually I got one at a (very, too) small startup. It paid poorly, and I was the only dev when I started. Can you imagine? Most of the site had been built by another mostly junior developer, and I was left to pick up where he had left off. Oof. Not the best environment for me to grow in, but eventually they brought on somebody a little more senior and I ended up learning some good stuff from him. More importantly, the job allowed me to get my foot in the door of the tech scene.
After a year there I joined another, slightly larger startup, and I’ve been there ever since. We’ve grown from maybe 10 people when I joined to more than 100. I’m coming up on three years now. The nice thing about a startup is that you get exposure to a lot of different things, so I spent time on the front end, on the server, touched Salesforce a bit, and now I’ve settled into leading our small data team. It’s fairly early days, but it’s exciting to think where we’ll be one more year from now.
This post kind of got away from me, but the point is that I haven’t written for a while, but I want to start back up again. The goal is to post at least once a month. Some might be short, some longer, but I’d like to make a habit out of it. Because I do enjoy writing, and I think that this can bring a little more balance back into my life.
See you soon.
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[1] Ok, not entirely true. I did get paid a paltry sum for this (since removed) article about book of homoerotic photography that I never read. But hey, I guess that means that I’m technically a professional writer.
[2] There were a lot of intimidating words like Meldebescheinigung and Bürgeramt, that’s enough to frighten any foolish young anglophone.
[3] There are no appointments, or something like that. I’m guessing this is a fragment of the message that was displayed.
[4] And the error was in Englisch! It said something to the effect of “Calm down.” It’s like they knew impatient expats were manically refreshing the page to get an appointment.