So It Begins... Again(?)

February 8, 2024

A new chapter has started, in a way it's like revisiting a book series you loved and finding a new entry. I'm on my second week at the new job.

I had a shot at something different (working in the casino gaming sector)... But, I knew that it would involve being awake at all hours, and having to devote an inordinate amount of my time to the company.

The law firm I interviewed with offered me what I was looking for: straight forward expectations and a realistic workload. Law offices can be notorious for having to work overtime, deadlines are critical, and you have to juggle hearing dates and things like that. But every so often you find an attorney who has put in enough time (often several years) and has struck a nice balance. I've never worked with this particular attorney directly before, but we know a lot of the same people from as far back as decade (or longer) ago. So I felt comfortable taking the job.

Thus far the attorney and I are getting along pretty famously. Really nice guy, super knowledgeable. I'm looking forward to not only being a asset to the office and utilizing my experience, but also seeing what more I can learn. Legal research is one of the things I love to do, I also love to write. So being able to do both and get paid for it is a wonderful thing. I suppose I'm fascinated by law because it's an endless journey, especially when you get into researching how certain laws came to be or the history of how certain philosophical concepts are interpreted over time. Law is its own thing, but heavily rooted, IMHO, in philosophy. Understanding how humans interact with one another helps to understand why certain statutes are written the way they are.

In addition to the gaming company, I also heard back from one of the cannabis cultivators that I applied to. I initially didn't respond to the email because it was a rudely written request to schedule a time for a phone interview. But, in the interest of being the bigger person, I opted to craft a response to thank them for reaching out while simultaneously informing them that I took another position with a different company. The response that I got back from that message was much more courteous. Sometimes it just takes being nice to someone for them to be nice to you back. I don't know that I'll ever have the opportunity to work in the cannabis industry ever again, especially now that I've gone back into the legal sector, but maybe the two will cross paths? Unlikely considering the type of law that I'm doing, but anything is possible I suppose.

My pkm has officially been gitted. I was using it merely hosted on my desktop here at home, which was acting a server for it. I decided that I wanted to be able to have access to the pkm anywhere, or on any machine. Git made the most sense for tracking changes and incrementally backing up my pkm. I also like the idea of having another abstracted layer of data concerning my personal knowledgebase. Being able to track changes means that I don't have to worry about deleting anything because in a sense it will still be preserved, just in a different way. This video was helpful and informative. I might do a readme file for the pkm that details how I have everything set up with a basic changelog and pin it at the top here on berkough.com. I'm not sure how many people would find my notes on building a pkm interesting or informative, but I took a very programmatic approach, somewhat inspired by this guy.

Primarily I'm using my pkm to organize my writing and keep tabs on random thoughts or ideas that I have. Like this blog post; it started off life as a markdown file inside of a folder called “ideas” that lives inside my “blog posts” folder, which is part of my “main” vault. Eventually it made its way into “drafts” and then “published,” which is where it lives now.

I started another vault for “work”, but I don't have much in there right now. I'll have to start spending more time during the evenings taking notes on different code sections or statutes, opinions, things of that nature etc. It was also supposed to house notes on my programming and art, and different things like that. Those activities are more akin to hobbies for myself rather than being work though.

When I stopped working in December, I never even tried to apply for a frontend developer job after taking the bootcamp from Promineo Tech. It wasn't that I didn't learn a lot, but the program really works the best if you land a junior developer position with a company before you even complete the course, and that is absolutely possible if you're able to dedicate that much focus to the program. I was still working full time, so even though I excelled at the coursework, I wasn't putting much energy (if any) into the social connections, and actually researching the industry. You have to make coder friends and try to work with people, or find open source projects and dig through issue trackers and see if you can figure that stuff out. That's how you meet people who can introduce you to other people, and that's how you build the ability to work with others in a collaborative software development environment enough for someone to seriously hire you for money. I didn't spend any time on any of that stuff, so when I had the opportunity to work on a commercial project, I knew all the lingo for a scrum board and enough git commands to get by, but I didn't have any real practice with it, and didn't have the proper amount of time to devote to it.

Like anything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

(In case you're curious, I have been using AI images to spice up this post. I may continue with that in the future.)