To be quite frank… I don’t want to go anywhere. I really love my job, and hope to continue to grow where I’m at.
I’ve considered what another career change might look like at this point in my life, and I don’t find the idea of starting over again enticing at all. I’m surrounded by great people, growth opportunity, and a comfortable situation. I’m happy to begin my shift each day, and I honestly don’t have to think about work at all when I punch out.
I’m also well aware of the fact that something could change at any point down the line. Times change. The needs of a business change. The people that have value today could suddenly lack that value to the company at any point. I know I can’t fully future-proof myself, but I absolutely can make sure that I’m valuable to someone, somewhere in the event of a need to change companies.
I’m spending time now working on projects and trying to sharpen my technical knowledge. I’ve grown to love Linux and use it as my daily driver on my personal laptop. By the way, said personal laptop is a Dell Lattitude E7450 that I bought from Ebay for roughly $150, shipping and all. The first thing I did was wipe it clean and install a Linux distro to force myself to practice every time I touch the machine.
As I type this, I’m using VSCode to write markdown files to generate content for this blog, created in Hugo, and then upload them to a LEMP stack hosted on Linode. I bought the domain for use with a number of things, including a Jitsi server, a Nextcloud instance, and a mail server among other small projects. Few things teach lessons the way that trial and error does, and every mishap is just another opportunity to strengthen myself in the wonderful world of tech.