Ups And Downs
I’ve had a lot of ups and downs over the past few months…….. I joined a trampolining centre!
It’s been a while since I last blogged. A number of reasons for this. Busy at work, un happy at work (a blog post for another time), quitting work, finding a new job, preoccupied with house repairs.
So let’s start at the top. Where were we? Oh yeah! The Jive Election I completed that project a year ago in late April or May last year. I then dedicated some time to learn several new languages and had an opportunity to challenge myself in languages that I was (or thought I was) already comfortable with.
I learned Javascript using a framework called Sencha Touch. This framework is not something I can recommend learning or something I would ever suggest using for an application running on mobile devices. Nevertheless, this opened up opportunities to learn the deep and dark arts of Javascript.
I also learned .NET and C#. .NET is something I shied away from traditionally preferring to use instead languages that were easily available on Linux machines. Compared to Java I found C# initially quite difficult to get to grips with. However I am a massive fan now. Some of the language features compared to what Java offers are incredibly powerful. I am pleased to see that Java is slowly adopting the idioms and also that C# is slowly becoming a first class citizen on OSs other than Windows.
I’ll briefly touch on why I left IBM: No career progression or training. I’ll elaborate on this in my next blog post as well but I think ultimately it was a good time to step away. I now start a new job as a Senior Android Developer at Hargreaves Lansdown. I look forward to blogging a bit more about what I’m doing there in the future.
Between jobs I considered becoming a contractor around Bristol and took up trampoling at Freedog. I can now do a front flip! Not consistently, mind, but well enough to show off to people. I would like to be able to do a front flip consistently as well as a back flip and those flips to the side. I might try and incorporate some of these into snowboarding, but I would image that is a whole other step above what I am capable of now.