What is that beautiful house?
I was reading through some of this Blog’s early posts last night. One of the reasons I started it was I wanted to have some kind of record of the things I’ve done and now the decade is coming to a close that’s proving useful. I was particularly drawn to this post where I talk about comitting to a career in software development and some of the things I was learning at the time achieve that. What’s interesting to me is the things that I taught myself, the Python, the Linux, running code remotely are all skills that I use today and the Java night school while useful has not lead to a job as a software developer.
I don’t really talk about what I do, and that’s something I definitly need to improve on. I’ve recently taken a Job as a Cloud Engineer at a DevOps consultancy, I just passed my Amazon Web Service’s Solutions Architect Associate certification and I owe it largely to some good decisions and some excellent advice I was given over the last few years. What’s notable in that old post is how blase I was about moving to London from Dorset.
This has meant some fairly drastic life changes such as moving to London from the shire. But that isn’t that interesting.
Without doubt moving was the single best decision I made in the last decade. The opportunities I’ve had do not exist anywhere else and my life is immeasurably differen’t to what it was six years ago. I don’t have a beautiful house, but I am finding myself asking myself “How did I get here?” and I think that was the change I made that has had the biggest effect. When I left University I had a vague plan about working for an MP or at a Think Tank, that was simply not realistic given where I was situated. When I moved to London I was working in the communications team of a Large International development Think Tank purely by chance within 6 months of arriving.