Hey!
Nick here. Long time.
I wanted to let know a few life updates that will change my posting schedule. But more importantly, I wanted to share my excitement with you about what’s to come.
Two days ago was my last day at Smartly.io, the company I’ve worked at for 3.5 good years. The people there are amazing. I still left because my priorities in life has changed since Charlotte (my daughter) was born four months ago.
The role I leave behind was a mix of engineering, project management, and customer support.
The role I’ll be starting is much more clearly defined. I’ll be starting as a senior software developer at Shopify in Feb!
I am excited, but if I’m honest, because I haven’t coded full-time in 3.5 years, I am also a little scared. Okay, maybe more than a little.
When I received the offer from Shopify I couldn’t believe it. They believed that I could operate on that level, despite not being a product developer at my last role. It was easy for me to jump from “wow, they see something in me” to “omg they’re going to see how incapable I am and expose me as a fraud when I start the job.” This is called imposter syndrome, and I’m feeling it for the first time ever in my career.
But I’ve gone through an inflection point: instead of being crippled by imposter syndrome, I’m facing up to it from first principles. What am I being hired to do? And which parts can I do well, and which parts can I not do well yet but could with practice?
So I wrote a partial list of what I can do well already:
… and what I can’t do so well yet, but could with practice:
Looking at the list, it turns out that I’m not a horrible candidate. I’ll just need to step it up on the stuff I can’t do well yet.
It’s towards this end that I started a new blog at LearnDaily.life.
Cool domain, right? I love it, too!
Anyway, this is a blog where I post my learning notes from the day, five times a week (likely coinciding with the workweek).
The premise is simple: focus on learning something each day, and post it so that I internalise the learning and become better at my job.
My secondary goal is to inspire anyone who stumbles on that (likely to be) messy jumble of blog posts to feel like they can do something similar for themselves and learn daily. Hence the name of the site!
I believe anyone can learn anything, but they must make the effort. Most people make excuses.
I harbour high hopes for this blog to be a playground for me to share what I learn as I learn them. For the first six months I will likely be focusing on learning everything about software development. Maybe longer. But I can already see that I’ll use this to share other kinds of learnings too. We’ll see in time.
Alright, good, that’s all I have to say about that!
So, to recap: I’m starting a new job in Feb, I’ll be focusing on getting good at software development by learning every day and sharing what I learn, and so I’ll be posting less on nickang.com and more on LearnDaily.life so that I can make a mess without stress.
Thanks for reading all of this. Happy Friday!
PS. I’ve already gotten started with four posts, so check out the site!
Sincerely, Nick 👋