Change Is Finally Here

Image by busy.pochi

Life has been crazy lately. I knew it would be a big change to move from the college environment which I loathed uncontrollably for a number of years. Thankfully that’s all over now and I can begin to enjoy life once again as a somewhat poor bachelor with ridiculous prospects for his future all while pretending to understand how life actually works.

So far, moving into the city has been a great experience. This has been my first time living somewhere where the population was over 30,000 and you don’t need a car to get to town. It’s also my first time working a fulltime job. During my years in high school and college I held a job through most all of it. A few years working in the corn fields at Burrus, a few years at a grocery store, a summer doing Google Summer of Code, and lots of time spent freelancing and doing computer related work for people. It’s all been great and I’m proud to have earned and paid for almost every thing I own out of my own pocket. It’s been tough, especially when people want you to come out with them and spend a bunch of money doing something in the moment and you can’t really afford it. But hell, I’ve always preferred staying in with a couple good friends playing video games or hacking on some interesting code anyways.

Now that’s all changed, the days of dreaming of working on cool projects at a job all day are gone and the reality is here. It’s wonderful, but at first, unbelievably tiring. I feel like I’m drinking from a fire hose working with DNA sequencing tools when the last biology class I ever took was freshman year in high school.

Moving to a new city, knowing next to nobody, and starting a job I didn’t understand was daunting. So far, I’ve loved every minute. The people I’ve met in just a couple weeks are amazing. The work is challenging and it’s something I can actually contribute to instead of being the new guy that needs to go through months of training to actually get his first successful commit that isn’t followed by a revert and two more commits optimizing the second poor implementation. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with and learn from. I feel like I’ve grown more in the past couple weeks than I did my entire college career. It is incredible to think it’s already been 2 and a half weeks since I sat down in the office with possibly soiled pants waiting incredibly nervously for my first day to start.

I took just 2 weeks off between graduation and starting my job. It felt terrible! Several people asked why I didn’t take at least a month off and the primary reason for that is my ambition is far too high to keep me lounging around for long. I needed the break to recoup from the educational prison I was kept in for so long.

Luckily, I have met some exceptional people like @dylanized and the guys at the inaugural St Louis Javascript meetup, all of whom I am incredibly excited to start getting to know and potentially work with.

While I have considerably less free time, it certainly has been a long waited and welcomed change. It’s time to go change the world. Enough writing. Enough reading. Get to work.