Done Since 2018-05-27

My first full week without N and the kids. The house seems very empty without them. They came up Sunday to swap cats, and I drove down to Rest Stop Monday to put j's bed (bunk over desk) back together. Offered to leave my drill and some driver bits, but G didn't want them.

I had three phone interviews with SunBasket on Tuesday. Friday I got their rejection email, which hurt probably more than it should have. That's really because I obviously haven't sent out enough job applications -- I put in three on Saturday.

It's tough finding jobs to apply for. (Non-geeks can skip ahead.)

Front-end is pretty much out, because that requires Javascript and typically one of the popular frameworks (usually React, but sometimes Angular). I should probably stop chasing Elm for a while and do something with React, but it would still take me a month or two to get even minimally good at it, and most places want a couple of years with code in production.

Back-end jobs still have a lot of Java, which is really the only thing I'm good at anymore, but a lot of them (the more interesting ones) want either Ruby (mostly Rails) or Python. And some want PHP, which for some reason hasn't died yet. And most also want relational database experience and/or container experience.

The real problem is that, except for the last five years as a Java code monkey, almost all my prior experience was in R&D rather than production. I picked up a lot of interesting skills, usually before they went mainstream, and ignored the stuff that wasn't interesting. A lot of it was at least somewhat in demand -- five years ago. But for the last five years the world has gone on without me.

And for the last year, when I could have been learning new programming languages, building stuff like phone apps, writing, and recording, I've been stagnating. Gun, meet feet. I'm doing that stuff now, but it's probably too late.

Add depression, impostor syndrome, low self-esteem and self-confidence, and decades worth of bad financial decisions. Things look pretty bleak. Sorry about that.

( Notes & links, as usual )