The long road

A blog post in 4 parts.

The site is starting to come together, it's getting some content and I can at least point people at the websites, projects and Linux archives should that be necessary.

Still no word about the job referenced a couple of posts ago. Since life has been busy I've felt little need to keep this up to date. I have another interview on September 11th. A lot further away this time but that's something to deal with when I get there.

I'm concerned about the coding test (all 45 minutes of it) since I don't have a CS degree I'm worried that my self taught approach of solving (programming) problems isn't sufficient to set me on the career path I'd like, I'm quietly hoping that everything else will make up for that and my experience will show where a fresh graduate might not comprehend.

I'm also concerned about potential employers actually starting to read this. I started musing on the idea back here and it was my father who suggested that I might want to make some of this private and consider this more a marketing tool since some of what's up here could be construed as “a bit too far out there”, in his own words. My counter argument is that I have no wish to censor myself. The company will be getting all of me, not just a convenient portion of me.

Back on the other side of the fence, could this jeopardise a potential job opening precisely because of how I don't wish to censor myself? I have next to zero readership, and I'm careful never to use names, and yet …

I've a suspicion some will be googling me fairly soon, so please do let me know.

The solution would be truly anonymous blogging, but I like to have others read what's going on in my life and be able to contextualise it. To date this blog has two major uses:

• a public diary where I throw down some thoughts just to get them out of my head. These are clearly the entries that may be “too far out there”.
• a social updater, vaguely following the DRY principle.

Typically things like “How'd the interview go?” will be a common question from friends and family, when they know I have had one recently. Writing it down saves me from a) typing it all out again and again and b) gets down a few of my own thoughts while it's still fresh in my mind. Why not use something like Twitter or Facebook? The former is not intended for this large pieces of text, while the latter is not geared for what is, essentially, read-only material.

The more astute of you will note there are no comments here; I have no desire to communicate with people en masse, more use some of the ideas and notions here as a starting point to spark conversation amongst those I already know. Interestingly for each entry that I've used as a conversation starting point (usually in response to a “How'd it go?” style question) has travelled in a different direction, because the readers have taken something different away from it. Were I to have talked about it to that person, I'd be inclined to tailor the story, and consciously or not, the conversation would get steered in the same direction with likely the same outcome. It makes very little difference to everyone else, but is less interesting for me after the 4th repeat conversation.

In other news, it was a fantastic wedding over the weekend (not mine!). I met some really great people, and the bride and groom looked like they had a fantastic time. I look forward to hearing all about it when they get back from the honeymoon.

If they're reading this: blog hi-five!