Time to reflect

Having resurrected the blog after some time away, I figured that the first order of business ought to be a touch of catch-up, it's seemed like a long year, despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of structure of new formal study modules to start, assignments to prepare etc..

Hmm - where to begin? 

I'll start at home:

The Washing Basket remains firmly abdicated, although we have negotiated terms over the ironing which gets exchanged for a full day's dish-washing.  After about 8 months I pulled myself off the couch and am starting to make inroads in domestic issues, the shed had a long-overdue overhaul and many loads of rubbish were taken to the skip, as well as new homes found for Phillip's old bikes which he'd long since outgrown.

Moving onto work:

The project I'd been working on since joining the team reached 'maintenance' stage, where there was no real new development work, and the support of the live product was to be taken on by a team in another location.  So, having successfully navigated my way to a point of confidence in my understanding of the project and its code, and having developed a great working relationship with my senior developer who'd joined in the latter stages of the project, of course we were moved on.

Moving on together was what I had expected, unfortunately that isn't what happened, we moved to separate teams on opposite sides of the room.  I think I'll save some of the gory details for a more long-winded post of their own, as those first few months in particular had a massive impact on my confidence levels and I think you may fall asleep before the end of this post if I try to cram all my thoughts about everything in here!!

I've learned a lot about the supporting technologies we use outside the project code itself, such as Gitlab and Docker, maybe sometimes at the expense of understanding how our project itself hangs together.  But in a couple of weeks time I will be the sole developer on our team for 4 months while the senior dev is on parental leave.  Can't say the prospect fills me with joy and confidence, but I am learning to face it with 'feel the fear and do it anyway' mentality instead of 'run!!!', so I will take that as a win for now.

And the grading/job issue:

Thereby hangs yet another long tale, to be shortened here to the salient points - jobs were eventually advertised (at 2 grades above my own substantive grade), online test was taken and passed (nay, aced), interview was survived and  done. 

And now we are in the interminable WAIT period for results - which were expected within a week (6 weeks ago tomorrow).  Confident of getting through as the management have said that bad  news travels faster so we would have heard quickly if we had failed.  But nothing will compare to being told officially, and eventually getting paid that higher salary.  For me it's always been much more about the substantive grade of any kind, the protection from being pulled away to process benefits again when someone decides there are too many support staff in the world.  But I'll admit to a certain level of excitement about the idea of jumping a grade entirely (coupled with trepidation of course too...)

More stuff to come once I can make some sort of structure out of my tangled thought-stream.

Where do we go from here?

Wow - it's been a LONG time between posts this time round!!

(and I will admit even a long time getting round to posting this and not sitting in a half-completed draft state!!)

I have to admit, I'd kind of lost my way a bit with the will to blog even over on the Beyond the Basket page -  I changed teams at work and with that came a massive slump in confidence.

I doubted how to continue now that I didn't have an 'OU journey' to blog about.

And at the time I felt like there were only so many ways I could keep saying 'this job is a roller-coaster of emotions'.  I've learned loads when I look back on it all, most of it unrelated to the project I'm working on, which is a new place to be.

But lately I feel a need to blog a little bit about the rollercoaster itself, it lends itself to my initial reasons for starting the blog in the first place - to share the ups and downs of the journey. 

And while this journey is now outside of the OU 'basket', I'm starting to realise that it's all still part of my 'OU journey' - I'm here, doing a job I love, partly because of my OU studies and the path they led me down.

So - that may have been the longest-winded 'hello again' you'll ever read, but welcome back, and I will try and keep you updated more often as to the twists and bends that life (and life as a Software Developer/Engineer/Insert next job title here) throws at me on this journey.

The 'Beyond the Basket' page will remain, as an archive to those heady early days of the job, but the journey and my story will continue over here on the main blog.