Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! v2.0

Well, almost a year to the day. Pretty bad…

BUT, at least I have a decent excuse. My wife and I had a beautiful baby girl, Haven, on Christmas Day. Shortly after I got the new job we found out about the pregnancy, and then it was doctor visits galore. For the past 5 months now it has been “Daddy time”, so, yeah.

A funny thing about this post and the last – they both have to do with changes. While there are the obvious ones (fatherhood), I mean career changes. You see, I have been on my contract this past year with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Digital (WDPRD) and I have been kicking some ass (if I may say so myself). I have been working hard to gain FTE there, and it has always been a bit like a carrot on a stick – just out of reach. Well, now I am coming up on my final day tomorrow.

A couple weeks back the axe fell and all contractors were cut. We lost some really good guys in Argentina, and now those of us in Seattle are gone too. Like the last time this happened, I have some options, so I am not too worried, but the whole “Daddy” thing is my priority, and I have been lucky enough to WFH 4 days a week, so I need to look for something matching that. Good luck to me…

As far as code goes, I don’t have a bunch new. The most recent stuff I did was just some JS sandbox stuff to play around. Here are some links:

JS “Hydra” – an interview test:
https://jsbin.com/wujaxob

Apple basket – add and eat apples from your “basket”:
https://jsbin.com/piruqa

Simple inheritance demo:
https://jsbin.com/vagoyu

Another simple inheritance demo:
https://jsbin.com/rubunu

Sandbox play-around:
https://jsbin.com/yejari

I have a couple of code tests from a recent interview that I will hopefully share soon. Or maybe next year. 🙂

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

I have neglected my blog for some time, and it is time I gave it a little love.

I recently went through a major career change. I received news that my employer of over 10 years was going through some financial hardship and that my hours were no longer guaranteed. I have been telecommuting for the past 5 years, so the news came as quite a shock. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to continue to telecommute, and the best I could hope for was a couple of days a week working from home.

Luckily I have been a developer for some time. I get a lot of recruiter emails, so I started replying and reaching out to previous recruiters I had spoken to. It did not take long for phone interviews to roll in, and then face-to-face interviews. I have always put way too much pressure on myself in interviews, and I was dreading going in to “code in ten minutes” or whiteboard or whatever.

The funniest part of this whole process is most of the employers I interviewed with were not actually on the MS stack – which has been my focus for most of my career as a developer. Most were on some sort of PHP codebase server side (eww…) but the majority of focus was on client-side. I am thankful for taking the leap into js frameworks!

So, I now have a new job in Seattle. I have to commute about 1.5 hrs each way, but it could be worse. I drive maybe 1.5 miles to the marina, park, hop on the foot ferry, then transfer onto the “big” ferry in to Seattle. Here are some pics from the ferry:

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IMG_20150529_060339

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If you gotta commute, commute in style

Anyway, to give some examples of some client-side code, I added some new gists and repos. Check them out if you like.