New Job

I started a new job a few weeks ago! I am now a Senior Developer at a prominent advertising agency.

The whole process was the fastest hiring process of my career. A team lead at the company saw my résumé on Triangle Devs chat and reached out (on Wednesday). We had a phone call later that day. The next day I visited the office and got a take-home coding challenge. Friday morning I submitted my solution, and by early afternoon I had an a very generous offer.

The company is small enough for everyone to know each other on a first name basis. My boss is very pleasant and has no problem investing in her employees. Nearly everyone at the company stays focused on work through the day, with very little interpersonal banter.

A co-worker once told me "We aren't friends; we just work together". I was taken aback initially, but what he said was true. I've become friends with co-workers, and I always try to be friendly. When I was introduced on my first day by the owner, half of the development team hardly glanced at me, even though our boss called to them several times! I hadn't expected to be welcomed with warm hugs, but it still felt pretty cold.

As for my daily tasks, our technology stack has proven a difficult pill to swallow. The position involves a good deal of advanced configuration of PHP frameworks/apps, primarily Magento and WordPress. I wrote PHP very early in my career, but once I learned Ruby, I never touched it again. (About a decade ago; I was upfront about this when interviewing.) I also write some JavaScript with jQuery and RequireJS.

Compared to the Ruby and modern JavaScript I've been writing day-in and day-out for the past many years, this job's technology feels like a large step back. I don't mean to imply that PHP or JavaScript are bad languages in themselves: while PHP is rarely mistaken for an elegant language, it can be mostly enjoyable. While legacy JavaScript (using jQuery and/or RequireJS definitely qualify) is often a chore, modern JavaScript has been my language of choice for all of my recent-ish side projects.

Hope is on the horizon though! Magento is giving their client-side code a major over-haul with a project called PWA Studio. PWA Studio is built on on top of React, GraphQL and related technologies, and will completely replace the legacy JavaScript libraries (🤞). Coworkers are telling me it will likely not be ready for several months, but it's encouraging to hear something of this scope is being worked on. I've poked around and read about PWA Studio, and I don't envy the ambitious mountain of work the Magento team is committing to. I am very interested in getting to see how well they pull it off. In the mean time, I still have plenty to learn and re-learn.