They say, “everything good in life lies on the other side of struggle.” This mantra defined my last four months.
The process for job searching in the tech industry is notoriously hard. Yet this felt like going 12 rounds with a heavyweight champion (and I’m not that tall).
My experience was a mixture of highs and lows: from “I nailed this one” to “I completely fucked it”; from “There’s definitely an offer coming” to “There’s no way they’re making me an offer after that.”
Oftentimes, the universe would make a joke at my expense, and I’d receive the complete opposite feedback to what I expected. But that’s the way these things go.
Throughout the process. That is, 14 interviews with 14 companies, and 51 rounds later—I tried to keep one thing constant: to be unapologetically myself.
I believe this made all the difference.
And the best part? Out of the 14 companies I interviewed, the company which made me an offer was the one I wanted the most.
And so, I turn the page to a new chapter. One which will take place in London. A place so similar to my home in Dublin, and yet so very different. The experience was blistery, but the skin grows back tougher.
The job search has taught me something valuable about persistence and authenticity. When you’re genuinely yourself, you attract the right opportunities, and the right kind of people enter your circle. The ones that can’t, for any excuse, pass you by.
Take a break if you need it. Get back on the saddle when you’re ready. And keep on pushing.
Bookmarks
Mote: An Interactive Ecosystem Simulation — Peter Whidden — This is both computationally fascinating and visually stunning. It’s by Peter Whidden, the same person who made the video Training AI to Play Pokémon with Reinforcement Learning.
Why is Zig so Cool? — I haven’t jumped on the Zig bandwagon yet, but given my background in C and C++; languages I grew very comfortable with but never used professionally, I’m excited by a language growing in popularity that offers interoperability with them. It has that necessary cult-following from the developer community to make the language programming nomenclature. Let’s see where it goes. Oh, and by the way, similar to Peter Whidden’s Mote project, Zig’s creator, Andrew Kelley, developed the language during his time at the Recurse Center. Sounds like a cool spot.
Can Machine’s Think? - Talk by Richard Feynman — Feynman is one of those people with the perfect amount of capacity and charisma to articulate complex subjects, making them not only understandable to the layman, but fun. The highlight for me in this talk was when Feyman explained how ‘intelligent machines’ will, given a certain heuristic, exploit the system (i.e, via spamming the same option every turn due to a generous reward), revealing that whilst machines are displaying human levels of intelligence, they simultaneously reveal the “weaknesses of intelligent human beings”. Food for thought.
NanoChat — An open-source LLM you can train for $100. Andrei Karpathy is paving the way for open-source developers to get started with LLMs and Deep Learning. This makes me want to go full-PewDiePie, buy a mid-range GPU, and train my own personal LLM.
Delta Components UI — Delta Components is getting closer and closer to a soft and then hard launch. If you’re looking for UI components built on top of shadcn/ui for an LLM interface, animated tabs, or focusable images, then check out the live beta versions on the site.
How to Start a Movement — Derek Sivers at TED — Analogy of the talk: The first follower is often the true leader, as they create a domino effect with which others follow.