Relief

Today as I'm writing this on September 7, 2024 marks one month since I was laid off from my previous role.

I shared an announcement on Twitter (X) yesterday that I had accepted a job offer and will be starting this upcoming Monday, as in two days from now. When I was in process of interviewing at a number of companies I wasn't letting myself get too excited about the potential of working for any one company, as you never know how interviews are going to go.

Finally, once I accepted the offer late on Thursday, I started to allow myself to get excited. By Friday afternoon, I was already in the Slack for my new employer and had access to an official email. It was very real then. The excitement was palpable, I had to go for not one or two walks, but FOUR walks to try and calm myself down.

I chose to start as immediately as I could, because my brain and body need the routine of a full-time job. This is against my better judgement given I have to prepare my Rails World (2 words) talk by next Friday, but now that the pressure of finding a job is off I can focus on writing and preparing the talk after work / this weekend.

That's another topic but when I was laid off, I knew I'd need to do something to try and help cope with the anxiety and other bad feelings I'd have until I landed somewhere new... so I convinced myself to pick up walking again and it's been super helpful to try and have that time in my day just for me.

I'm deeply grateful for anyone who's helped me on my search, my tweet I wrote as I was getting off the call where I was laid off reached over 60k views and I had so many helpful replies. I couldn't have done it without the wonderful community and friends that reached out with job postings, suggestions or just to be there for me.

That's all from me for now, I expect to be onboarding for a few weeks, as I learn the new business and codebase patterns. I hope to onboard as quickly as possible, I want to get back to writing code and doing my best work.

Thanks for reading, as always. I'll be sure to write some notes to share as I onboard onto my new role.

~ Andrea