Several months ago I wrote about my job search, and some of the failures along the way. In September, I was brought on board to SpotOn as a software engineer, using a language called Go. This is a language I’m new to but is one that I was very interested in gaining more experience in. At least 6 months before I started this job I read a book about Go and started solving programming puzzles through a website called exercism.io which has volunteer mentors to help you learn a language. I also started building an app for analyzing expected moves in the stock market using Go. In the end, this was enough for me to land a job. This the formula I’ve used to find employment in software engineering without a college degree:
Step 1 - Spend a significant amount of time learning about a subject as deeply as possible while simultaneously building something - anything at all that is interesting.
Step 2 - Show off the thing you built to a prospective employer and thereby prove that you have the skill necessary to help the business achieve its goals.
Step 3 - Accept the offer.
Finding a new job is a rough business. It’s in everyone’s interest to view you with skepticism and mistrust. You have to repeatedly attempt to sell yourself and prove yourself worthy of consideration, and most of the time you’ll get a proverbial door slammed in your face. After a lot of pain and heartache and perseverance, you (hopefully) eventually find someone who can tolerate your weirdness.
After a series of 4 interviews, SpotOn sent me and offer and subsequently accepted my request of 90k, no questions asked, which actually kind of makes me wonder if I went too low. I do feel a bit weird talking about salary, but I also don’t think it should be as taboo as it is in American culture, so I’ll happily be the weirdo who blurts out the number if I can do my part to break that furtive tradition of being secretive about salary as if we’re divulging the nuances of our sex lives.
Anyway, they mailed me a MacBook Pro and I was off to the races (the other option was Linux; I’m not that big of a nerd). I was brought on to work on the Point of Sale (POS) system, which at a basic level is the software that a restaurant employee might use to punch in your order. After about a month of getting acclimated to the culture and the codebase, I was put on a team with 2 other engineers (both who were newer than I was), making me the lead, at least tacitly if not temporarily. Our mission was to redo how the system handles loyalty, (such as earning points and rewards). This involved a massive amount of changes not only to the Point of Sale system itself but also to various web-based frontends, android, and iOS apps, which involved coordination with the teams in charge of those systems. The last few months have been high octane and stressful for me, not helped by the fact that I’m also taking a Calculus class on the side - and let’s just say I’m not exceptional at math. Mercifully, that was my last class before I officially graduated in data science.
At this time I’m not planning on my degree helping me professionally in any way, but that was never the point. Humor me for a moment while I enumerate the reasons why I decided to finish my degree:
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I was curious if there was another field other than software engineering that would be more fulfilling. In short, I was courting data science. In the end, it’s a fascinating subject and I’m gratified to have more experience in it, but I’ve also realized that the thought of giving up software engineering makes me very sad. I love diving into a large codebase and the creative challenges inherent are endlessly interesting. I think it’s safe to say I’ve found love. I’m going to be more mathematically mature if I’m going to seriously pursue this field. That doesn’t necessarily mean more school, to me it means spending a significant amount of time at home with a pen and paper practicing math problems. With a new child at home, time is a very limited resource these days.
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While I may not transition to the data science field professionally, I plan on using ideas and concepts from data science to hone my craft as a options/stocks/whatever trader. This remains a dream that is alive and well, and partially explains the allure of data science in the first place. Even before data science, I’ve worked out a couple of strategies that are consistently profitable, albeit ones that set up more infrequently that I’d like. I’ve put work on honing my trading craft on hold for the past 2 years while I’ve been attending school, but in 2021 I’m coming back with a vengeance.
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And we wanted to find somewhere with cheaper rent than the Phoenix area. Rexburg fit the bill pretty well. I guess we needed school to give us an excuse to live somewhere boring and cheap.
Currently, I’m the only one between me and Emily with a job that makes money. We didn’t choose this configuration because I’m the male or something similarly ridiculous. It just so happens that Emily worked as an independent contractor and so I have a more reliable income. But one happy side effect of waiting to have kids is that Emily is not dependent on me. She’s reasonably established in her own career which means that if something were to happen to me, she wouldn’t have a difficult time reentering the job market. This seems like a sensible approach to reducing risk, but also to help Emily stay sane. Even without a job, she has many projects she can work on that keeps her mind and skills sharp and which serve to stave off the monotony inherent in the duties of making sure a child stays alive.
For example, we’re both working together on an app for managing grocery lists and recipes (which we currently use and is very helpful), and with school no longer being a burden I should have more time to help with that. She’s also currently practicing writing blog posts about interior design. I don’t think she’s ready to share any of them yet, but maybe someday you’ll see some words she’s written.
As the year closes, I figure it would be good to take an inventory of our teeth:
Dallin - The normal amount
Emily - The normal amount minus one real tooth, plus one implant
Kev - 5 teeth, two on the bottom, three on the top
In a previous blog post, I mentioned that our goal was to move out before winter. However, as it came time for our lease to end, I was still taking classes, and I was looking for a new job, partially because my pay had been cut due to the pandemic. This compounded by the thought of moving with a 1-year-old was just too much for us. So here we sit, in the dreary arctic tundra of Rexburg winter, sometimes regretting our decision, as Emily has reptile blood (allegedly) and craves sunny warmth and goodness. However, we’re trying to focus on enjoying each moment and savor Kev being a baby, because he’ll be grown up before we know it, and we’re pretty happy all things considered.
During this winter season, we can’t help but turn our minds back to when Kev was a newborn and Emily fed him for hours and hours, often in the middle of the night. She never went outside except occasionally to walk across the parking lot to the gym to walk with Kev on the treadmill, since that was often the only way we could get him to sleep. Those were hard times for us, but we survived (not that we really had a choice).
While we have had very little free time this past year, one habit that we’ve been able to retain is our insatiable appetite for reading. The Kindle app we use keeps track of reading ‘streaks’, and we would have read for at least 365 days leading up to Kev’s birth but once he was born our streak was broken like a twig in a hurricane. After things settled down a bit, we got back in the saddle, and this year we smashed our previous record, and have read for more than 365 days in a row! We’re also cheating a bit, as we both are connected to the same account (ssshhh).
One way that we are able to keep up the reading habit is that we replaced the habit of social media with something better: every time we were tempted to reach for our phone to get a quick and ultimately unsatisfying dopamine hit from social media, we opened the Kindle app instead (this works best if you delete your social media apps). I read in line at the grocery store, when I’m pooping (too much info!), and when I’m keeping an eye on Kev By doing this, Emily read over 40 books, and I’ve read a mere 25.
Here are our top 5 favorite books of the year. These are one’s we highly recommend, and in fact some of you may have received some of these as gifts this Christmas.
Emily
Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Hard Times: An Oral History of The Great Depression
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Dallin
Educated: A Memoir
Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Boundaries: When to Say Yes, When to Say No, To Take Control of Your Life
Crime and Punishment
Kev had his first birthday last month. Here are a few of the many things he’s learned this year.
- How to eat solid food
- How to tell us he doesn’t want to eat something (throw it on the ground)
- How to put lids on things
- How to stand up on his own
- How to drink out of a straw and an open cup
Right at about his year mark, we weaned him off completely from formula and bottles (after getting the green light from our pediatrician), since formula no longer gives him the nutrients he needs and bottles will be bad for his teeth. Rather than wean him off the formula and then the bottle, which we’d have to do eventually, we figured we’d do it all at once. The first few days that we didn’t give him the bottle he was expecting were brutal; it was one long fit fest. It also didn’t help that he had just received his vaccines and was feeling under the weather. Thankfully, we only had to suffer a few days, but now he’s back to his typical, ebullient self, except he’s completely weaned off both formula and his bottle. He gets all his nutrients from solid food and drinks water and milk from straws and open cups! I have to give credit to Emily, as I was about ready to give in, but she stuck to it like a hard-ass and insisted that this is what will be good for Kev in the long run. I hope this continues to be our parenting style: we’re more concerned about doing what’s best for Kev than making sure he doesn’t experience discomfort or doesn’t dislike us.
If you want to see photos of Kev, check out this photo album.
A tornado name Kev. This is what happens when you have kids:
We traveled to California for Thanksgiving, and since Kev’s birthday was on Thanksgiving, we also had a birthday celebration. He’s too young to know what’s going on, but adults seem to enjoy it, and it’s a good excuse to eat some cake.
Well, this has been a little long winded, which I apologize for (unless you enjoyed it, in which case I take it back). Now that I no longer have school to eat up my time, I’m hoping I’ll have slightly more time to read and write.
I have a good feeling about 2021.
