I have to confess.
I’m too lazy. I should be working on finding a co-op position for the summer. Last year, my cousin was in the same position, and he didn’t find one. He left it till too late. I sneered at him behind his back.
Earlier in the year, last quarter, I was fired up and raring to go. I started doing research over Christmas break. I had sent out 7 resumes by mid-February. I was far ahead of my classmates. I got positive replies from several employers, and an interview from one. The interview yielded a job.
That job must have really burned me out, because I haven’t sent out another resume since then. The indifference of man who hired me, his lack of communication with me, the disinterest of the other employees in my department (they didn’t even introduce themselves, after 2 months), and finally, their failure to deliver my final pay check left me angry and disillusioned with a company that I had admired.
Far from daydreams about high paying jobs with prestigious companies, like I was, I now consider whether I should go back to my old job washing cars this summer, or maybe shoot a bit higher and try to get a job assembling bikes.
What brings me joy these days:
I still love writing code. As aggravating as it is, as lost as I feel, when I finally get something to work the rush is incredible. I love it when I know what I’m doing, fall into a groove and sit there banging out code for hours. Or when a problem gets stuck in my head, so I think about it in the shower in the morning, on the bus to school, during the lectures, and finally solve it in the lab after several hours of wrangling. The green bar in a JUnit test is probably my favourite thing in the entire world right now.
Programming is my passion. But am I good enough? When build something on my own I don’t have much success. One job I applied to involved a lot of PHP. It’s a company called Radar Hill. I really want to work there, it sounds brilliant. I like PHP too, despite the constant house-of-cards feeling I get when I code in it. But they use the Cake framework, which they say is easy to use. Well, I’ve been trying, off and on for months, to get the stupid thing running on my computer. Can’t. I’ve tried half a dozen times, made some progress, but have not yet even gotten to the point where I can actually write and install code. I’m still trying to figure out why the .htaccess files don’t work.
The internet says that the CakePHP documentation is pretty bad, which fires up in me the desire I feel every time I encounter incomplete docs, to fix them and make them right. I could be a technical writer pretty happily.
I can chuck it and build wheels instead. I love building bicycle wheels. I may regret the lost time for awhile, but I always bounce back to happy. Instead, I’ll slog through, gasp with joy every time I see that green bar, try to motivate to build something, try to will myself to look for a job.
I don’t feel hopeful. Only bloody minded determination.