On to something new
Today is a fairly significant day for me. For the past 21 (and a bit) years I've worked for the same company. I know that, for lots of people in my industry, that's a hell of a long time to be in one position. It was a setup that served me pretty well; the company was small (I'm not much of a big company person), I generally got to dictate the development tools and direction, and I also got to work from home.
The working from home part was especially helpful as other life events involved me and happened around me. The job I've been in has seen a marriage come and go, and a move from Hampshire to Lincolnshire, and then from Lincolnshire to Midlothian. There's been a few adventures along the way.
But, three months ago, I got a call to say that I was to be made redundant. This sucked, obviously. It also appeared pretty stupid on the part of my employer: a company that is based around software had decided it no longer wanted an in-house software developer. A bold, and I think unwise, choice. From this point on they've decided to only go with contract developers and only contract developers from overseas (or so the story goes).
As it goes, things have turned out okay. Today is my last day with my old employer and, as I'm sat here typing this out while having some lunch, I'm actually glad that it's coming to a close and that I can get to move on.
I have a new employer, and will be starting in my new position during the first week of January. It'll be very different. It'll all be different. Not only will I be back working in an office (one where jeans and t-shirts are the norm, thankfully!), I'm also going to be working in an industry (as a developer still, of course) that I have no background in and no real knowledge of. It's going to be a seriously exciting challenge.
Over the next couple of weeks I've got a fair amount of background reading (and video watching) to be doing. This isn't so much that I can get on with the job of development (although there will be a good bit of that to do too -- who doesn't want to be trying to understand new options for development?), it's more about understanding the language of the industry I'll be in and so that I can understand the needs of my users.
Goodbye fashion retail and all related things. Hello genetics and... well, I don't know, I'm going to find out. :)
References & mentions
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Today's Emacs Lisp package tidy-up is of a package I first wrote a couple of employers ago. While working on code I often found myself viewing FASTA files in an Emacs buffer and so I thought…
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… working from home full time. This isn't that big a deal for me as I spent around 22 years doing so up until 2018, and of course it isn't that big of a deal to many folk these days anyway thanks to the 2020- perio…
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While I have been on the receiving end of redundancy once before, that was after 21 years of service at a company that, while it was in part about software developm…
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…ing a lot smaller. Which was perfectly fine. Me and that desk wrote a lot of code. Me and that desk transitioned from one job to another, and then another. Me and that desk made it through the pandemic. It's been a good desk. But it was…
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…on and one that seems to crop up in various places, and since I first got into using macOS and then subsequently got back into coding lots in Python it's absolutely an issue I ran into. With my previous employer, while I was the only developer, I w…
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…for them. After the 3 month notice period the final day came. Meanwhile, I found something new that looked terrifying but interesting. In the end it was less terrifying and way more interesting than I imagined it would be. It was fun…
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…uby. It's only in the last couple of years that I've got back into it, and in a huge way, thanks to my (not-quite-so-) new job. Despite the quirks and oddness (as I perceive them), I actually quite like Python and it's one of …
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…urn of events personally given that I'd worked from home for 21 years, then (with some trepidation) went back to working in an office. Having got used to being in an office and being around people, it took some adjusting to working a…
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…s (that was when I met Ruby). It was only 22 months ago that I started using Python a lot thanks to a change of employer. As you might imagine, much had changed in the 15+ years since I'd last written a line of Python in…
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It's been very quiet on the blogging front, I'm afraid, mostly for the reasons I wrote about back in December last year. In that time I've been really very busy with work (in a good way, in a very good way) and there's …
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