2012

It’s time for another one of those self-indulgent “what am I going to do with the next year?” posts. I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since the last one.

First off, I’m going to look at the past year. Finish SICP I definitely progressed with it, but not finished yet. Get a decent online portfolio As a matter of course I put all my toy projects into my Github account, but there’s nothing particularly exciting there. Keep blogging I did pretty well with this until October. Do something good in node.js I started this, and I’d like to carry on at some point. I definitely get Node now, but I want to play more. Learn a functional language I’ve started reading/working through the print version of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good, which is brilliant. Stack Overflow I kinda neglected my SO profile over the latter half of the year. Oh well.

So, those were the steps I’d laid out for myself for last year, but they were all in service of my main goal of 2011, which was to

establish myself as someone who knows what they’re doing and people will pay to code stuff.

With this, everything went better than expected.

In August, two crazy things happened. First, I was approached by a talent scout at Facebook and asked if I was interested. I said hell yes, so they sent me a pre-interview puzzle thing to complete. This was my solution. They liked that, so I went on to have three phone screens. After those they rang me up and asked if I’d like to come out to Palo Alto for an interview! My mind was officially blown at this point.

Things got even crazier when I received an email the night before I was due to fly out to see Facebook, from a recruiter at Twitter. I’d been referred by JavaScript guru Angus Croll, to whom I’m eternally grateful.

Anyway, I went out to Palo Alto, visited San Francisco, had my interviews at Facebook HQ, and flew home. After I got back I had my phone screens with Twitter, followed by another offer of an interview. I found out on my way to the interview in San Francisco that I didn’t get the Facebook job - they were looking for a JS/CSS developer, and my CSS skills aren’t top notch. Also, I think they picked up on my general meh-ness about the actual Facebook product.

So, another trip to San Francisco (which cemented my growing suspicion that SF is the place for me - such an awesome city), more interviews, and then, a few days later, a job offer! So, now I’m living in San Francisco, working on what is probably my favourite thing on the internet, with legends. And it’s awesome.

So, anyway, 2012.

2012

I don’t want to rest on my laurels. There’s still so much more I want to learn.

  • Finish Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

  • Finish SICP

  • Write something decent in Node (still)

  • Read more of the books on the first page of this legendary Stack Overflow question (I’m at about 30% so far)

  • Branch away from JavaScript a bit, maybe with Scala

  • Start blogging again (this is my first post since October - whoops!)

Anyway, here’s to 2012!