208 Days Later

My grand plan for regular updates failed miserably…

The Job Search

The hunt for employment has, so far, been fruitless. I’m unsure whether I have been looking at a bad time of year (although, I have been looking for over six months now), or the jobs are just in that short supply for junior positions. It’s an exceptionally demoralising situation, with no obvious solution. I’ve spoken to dozens of agencies, sent my CV to a plethora of different software companies: not just game companies, travelled the UK for interviews (for which expenses are rarely covered), and spent a great deal of time bettering the skills I have, while reading up on new ones.

In my pursuit of diversification, I’ve taken on a work experience position at an Edinburgh based company who specialise in cloud orchestration. The work that this company does is completely new to me. The technologies used are ones that I have never touched upon before in university or my own projects. I have been with them for a few weeks now and have barely scraped the surface of what I need to know to actually contribute.

The internship keeps me busy throughout the standard nine to five week, which has reduced my job hunting time significantly. While it isn’t what I would consider to be an ideal situation, I am grateful for the opportunity that they have given me.

Projects

I’ve been asked to create a web based application - another area upon which I have barely touched. There’s a lot of research to do before I can actually get down to working on code, but it should be an interesting project. I’ll be travelling to London some time next month to shadow the companies employees to gather the information I’ll need to flesh out a prototype. I foresee many late nights ahead.

In addition to this, I’m still working on creating a presentable software portfolio. So far, only game companies have requested one, which is unfortunate. While I do have all of my private repositories on Bitbucket, I would rather have some cleaner code to show on GitHub. I even saw one job listing that used GitHub contribution history as a requirement!

Moving Forward

Since graduation I have gained two jobs… neither of which are paying… and lost a lot of spare time and savings. Hopefully the new year will bring new jobs, and the chance at an income.