I applied for a different coding gig and after doing all the interviews and such I found out that I didn't get it.
I kind of promised that I wouldn't set my sights on another company for this year but as I've lately been growing a bit discontent with the lack of initiatives at Carfax that interest me I decided to go ahead and apply somewhere else.
The funny thing is: the second I applied and started going down that road was the same second that projects at Carfax just started to show a bunch of promise. So I'm not as bummed as I could be.
I'm still disappointed in myself though. I didn't show my best side. The final day I had a panel interview with the team I was applying to be on and a pair programming session with another person where they tested my general technical knowledge.
The pair programming wasn't difficult but I didn't knock it out of the park like I felt I could have. I was a little nervous and second-guessed myself a little too much. Because of this, I wasted a bunch of time and probably didn't give off the confidence I know I can have.
The panel interview went pretty good in the sense that I felt like I was able to communicate what I was all about... it just wasn't good enough for the position they were hiring for evidently. Or maybe I simply wasn't a good fit for that particular team.
At the end of the day, from what I hear from the folks on the inside, they had a handful of other devs applying and some of those were very experienced and they simply went with one of those people.
But that's always the case in this business. In any competitive job there are always other people with more experience and since I didn't get into this business until I was 27 -- the average age of a programmer, I feel like I'll always be "perennially inexperienced" at least with respect to my age.
I strongly believe in myself and my ability to make things come to life with code. I believe in my ability to bring fresh ideas to the table but also the work ethic to actually make it happen. And I know I have the standards of an experienced programmer. And even if I'm not always as fast, I compensate by putting in more effort, passion, and energy.
But in the end, none of that really matters unless I'm able to convince the other guy.
And this time I couldn't do it.
To dominate any interview (up to a Google interview), I need to 1.) spend serious amounts of time mastering core knowledge of computing, 2.) learn and derive common algorithms, 3.) practice thinking on the fly with challenges, and 4.) read a lot more code that I didn't write myself. But as I mentioned last week this is a bit of a distraction from my goals because I'm not "making anything." I still don't know how I feel about it. It's likely I'll persue this in the near future. I just haven't decided if I'm going to start this year.
That's where I'm at with all of this.
I watched a bit of Google IO and saw that they are going to start transcribing / indexing podcasts which kind of makes PAPIO irrelevant. I probably won't develop for it any longer... I'll only add my own stuff most likely.
Since experimenting with "HumanGQL" last week, I see a need for some tooling in the GraphQL community and have been putting in a bunch of dev time to explore that.
I definitely exceeded my exercise goal for the past week by biking to work and doing a bunch of yoga. Time to make up for lost time. If there's one good thing about failing a job interview that's a remote work position it's that I'll still have plenty of long bike rides to and from Carfax every day when it's nice outside. Yay...?
Onward and Onward.