Sunday 23 April 2017

Been a While

It's been a long while since my last post. That's not to say I have been idle. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

After working 10 years first as a sales representative and another 10 years as a credit professional I decided it was time to finally pursue my true passion: programming. I have been programming since I was in my early teens and it has always been a passion of mine.

At one point I thought maybe I'd like to write games but I soon became disillusioned by the video game industry. I became confused as what I wanted to do and one thing leading to another, my career path headed in another direction.

I was quickly approaching a time in my life where either I commit to my path or pursue my passions. It was time to make a choice. However, being married with kids, making a life change comes with a tremendous amount of pressure and fear. If I fail or make the wrong choice, it's not just me who suffers the consequences.

The opportunity that presented itself also required us moving roughly 300km away. We had been wanting to move back to the Okanagan Valley for quite some time and now we could do it. My children are still young enough that lasting friendships haven't formed yet but still it would be hard on them.

So, I accepted a position at Acro Media where we primarily build custom Drupal e-commerce websites. I, specifically, work on supporting existing sites and maintaining our in-house infrastructure. Luckily, this means I don't exclusively program in PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS. I also get to work in C++ and Go.

I wasn't sure how I would feel about working in PHP for much of my day. I am not a fan of the language for many reasons but I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that they joy of programming has thus-far eclipsed working in a language I dislike. I think this is mainly due to the fact that my day is quite varied. My job is about solving problems. It's not so much what language I'm using.

So where does that leave the blog?

Well, I hope that it means that'll be writing more again. Compilers are still a passion and I'm working on another project. It's rather ambitious so we'll see what happens there.

On that note, I think I'll call it a day. Until next time!