Job hunt

Starting the good ol’ job hunt. Trying to figure out what I’m going to be doing with myself for the next couple years of my life. Big ol’ decision that it is.

I’m seriously considering continuing on with my current job at CACI. It is an awesome job with awesome people. I work with good kids, and my bosses and everything else is really good. The main downside is my moral dilemma of working for the government. I’m technically working for a defense contractor, working on a portal for on-base use. So I’m not doing anything except allowing the government to communicate with themselves better; which with my view of the inefficiencies of government, could be seen as a good goal.

I’m looking at places out in Cali, Kansas (the makes of Django!), and Australia very strongly. I want to be in a neat place, with good culture and good waves :) Too much of my life has been lived without surfing, so I need to get back to it. It’s one of my true passions in life, and cannot be suppressed much longer. I also want to be in a college town, because that breeds culture and cool people. Plus I do someday want to be a teacher or at least an adjunct at a school, which requires an advanced degree. So being near a good college would allow me to go to said college easier ;)

I’ve been throwing lots of my old projects back up on my website, in working order. They are all Perl programs, and bring me back to my roots. It’s amazing that I wrote a couple of them in high school! I feel like my college years have not been as useful in side projects, but that can be easily explained. For one, I’ve gotten a degree in CS! Lots of my time has been devoted to learning, and school projects that are academic in nature but important none-the-less. A couple of my updates have in fact been school projects, or independent studies, which is good. I see the progression in my skill as a coder and general “computer scientist” to be a natural and linear progression. All of the baby steps I took earlier in my career have enabled me the through understanding of the mechanisms now at my disposal.

Been trying to find time to actually update my resume. Tinkering with my old code to get it working again is good fun, resume writing is about the polar opposite. It’s coming along though, and is a work in progress. It’s interesting writing a resume for myself because it differs from most other people I know in fundamental ways. As my friend Jeff said: “You have marketable skills, lucky”. Technical resumes are awesome in that regard. Lots of languages with lots of years of experience is a good things.

However, my main problem that I’ve been struggling with is how to convey my passion for the craft in my resume. I feel that it is intrinsic, and people will be able to see it. The whole getting my CompTIA Linux+ certification in high school, and doing the lyrics program to scratch an itch are good indicators. However, I can’t help but feel that there are more design-oriented and literary aspects that I could use.

Upon reflection (aka writing it down..neat, knew there was a reason I did that) I presume that these feelings are more of a lack of control and understanding. My limited skills in the design and literary fields breed insecurities in my understanding of their use. I assume there are ways that I could represent myself differently if I had those skills, but I guess you can’t have everything right? The always present academics dilemma: The more you learn, the more you learn you don’t know…

Cheers and wish me luck, should be an interesting couple of months.



Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!