Consistency Is Difficult

Taking on too many things at once can lead to burnout.

I think I owe you an explanation.

What Happened To Advent Of Code?

I’ve been crazy busy these past couple of weeks with the holidays. And to be completely honest I didn’t feel like AOC was the best use of my time right now.

I’m in the thick of interview prep and interviewing, and parsing text files isn’t going to help me land a job. I wanted to do AOC this year, but once I started going through the problems I realized it wasn’t a good use of my time.

What Have You Been Doing Then?

I did stick with my goal of learning Go

I went through the entire Exercism learning tracks for Go and Ruby. Ruby to see if there were any fundamentals I was missing because most of the jobs I’m getting contacted about are for Ruby. I think I’ve learned enough Go that I could be productive on a team right away. I don’t know that it would be Senior+ level quality code, but it would get the job done and then in a code review, someone more experienced could help with the best practices side of things.

I’ve been reading a few books

I finished Tidy First? by Kent Beck a couple of weeks ago. Highly recommend that for all software engineers as it essentially permits you to clean up your code instead of passing it off as tech debt that never gets refactored.

I’m currently about 3/4ths of the way through The Software Engineer’s Guidebook by Gergely Orosz, the Pragmatic Engineer. This book has been an excellent read so far because it took the experiences that I had at my previous employers and gave me the proper words to describe things the way the rest of the industry would expect to hear them. I’m not learning a lot of new things personally because I’ve experienced most of what he’s writing about, but its another book I highly recommend for all software engineers, particularly ones looking to grow into the Senior+ level.

And then after I finish that I plan on reading through System Design Interview Volume 1 and Volume 2 by Alex Xu of ByteByteGo. I’ve gone through most of his first book in the past, but now he’s released a second volume with even more knowledge. But in addition to the books, the ByteByteGo blog/newsletter is incredibly valuable and I plan on going through the archives there for even more system design knowledge.

Job Interviews Galore

I’ve been doing multiple interviews a day. Granted most are just introduction calls because of the holidays there aren’t any engineers working to do technical interviews.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to find work right now. I’ve had multiple interviews get to the final stages and then I get ghosted by the company with no reason given. The only thing I can think of is someone who fit the position better on paper came into their pipeline and so they moved on to them. There are thousands of engineers looking for work right now, many of whom are coming from layoffs in big tech with very impressive resumes.

What I’m doing to set myself apart is some good old-fashioned work ethic. I’m busting my ass building projects and networking. I’m spending 10-15 hours a day either interviewing, applying to jobs, growing my skills and knowledge, networking with industry peers and recruiters, etc.

I refuse to be passive in this search. I will find a job and I will continue this hustle into the future to stay on top of these skills. I will never allow myself to feel stuck at a company again because I’m rusty at technical interviews.