Experience: My Career Journey

I wanted to share the story of my career, so far. I've been blessed with a heck of a time and I am so excited to see what's next. I've had the opportunity to foray into many portions of technology (ie. backend, front-end, design, mobile, and security), as well as developing my physical skills (ie. masonry, carpentry, plumbing, renovating), and the luxury of experiencing many different worlds (ie. travel, living, jobs).

Let's start the story after graduation...

Volunteering

After graduating from Lynchburg College (now known as The University of Lynchburg) with a major in Computer Science, and minor in Physics. Even though I had taught myself to create an iPhone app (SnapMenu) as my senior project, I was unsure of myself, of my skills, and of my worth. I volunteered my time with anyone that needed computer help. I joined things like Start-Up weekends, where I had my first taste of working with exceptional people (college was usually made of teams where one or two people carried the group). I also worked as a cookie delivery boy.

Finally, a volunteer colleague of mine asked me why I didn't have a tech job, and I, while I had applied at numerous spots, till then, didn't really know why. He reached out to one of his friends in town who ran a consulting business called CvilleIT and set me up with an interview. I, as usual, bombed the interview. It's hard to sell yourself, when you're not even sure what you're capable of. As the interview was finishing, I asked the President of the company (this was a small company) to give me a chance. Just one month to prove myself. I didn't even really care if I got paid.

He accepted! I had a job!

They were just about to put together the first Lockn' Music Festival, and needed my help, so I served as an executive assistant to him for the whole week. I had a blast! I got to use walkie-talkies, drive golf carts, meet important people, send out app notifications to thousands of festival goers, listened to awesome performances. I even got a chance to build a ticket management system in Excel (while it was being used)! And since we ran out of cash, I was tasked with running a tent that served as a manual ATM. We'd swipe their cards to purchase "tickets" and give them back cash. I had the best of times.

When the week was over. I was handed a check for over $2000! (I had worked just over 100 hours that week). And was officially hired as a Backend PHP Developer for $20/hr ($41,600 yearly) with the understanding that this would be revisited after a year.

Backend PHP Developer

I loved learning PHP, I had done some in college and SnapMenu's api was built with it. We were using Symfony as our backend with a JQuery UI front-end. I got to learn about databases, APIs, and data structures. I got a chance to understand how to move work from Dev instances, to Test, and ultimately Production. I got to work with interesting, knowledgeable people. Each of them quirky in their own right, but fun loving and dependable. Not only that, but I also got to learn JQuery UI. I really found myself caring about how things were made. I really cared about having THE BEST data base structure, or refining the UI until it looked just right.

Lead (Sole) Designer and Front-end Developer

A few months in, our Lead Designer put in his two months notice, he had to move to New York with his wife. This was before the days of telework, so we had to find a replacement. The President, noticing my attention to detail, asked me if I wanted to try becoming a Designer.

Would I ever?! Heck yeah!

So for two months, I studied under our Lead Designer. I learned Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but it turns out, he was much more than a designer. He had an incredibly advanced understanding of CSS, and HTML. He was really more of a Front-End Developer and Designer. He was a wizard with CSS. I loved learning under him. I loved being exposed to every project in the company. I loved being helpful. When he departed, I got a chance to fill his shoes. He did such a good job helping with the transition that it felt almost natural. Here I was, less than half a year into the company and I was already their Lead (and sole) Designer and a Front-End Developer. By being exposed to every project in the company I started to get a sense of what school taught me. With my "proper" education, I could solve near-impossible bugs throughout the organization since I understood the underlying mechanics that were happening under the hood. For the first time, I actually started to feel valuable.

There was a moment when we had a high profile music industry client who (for some reason or another) had a tweet scheduled to unveil a new tour. It was something that couldn't be postponed for whatever reasons. I remember my boss telling me 15min before the "Go Live" and having me jump on a call with his team to figure out what to do with ten minutes to go. While on the call, I logged into their server. I knew I had to work fast, so I got all the tools I would need ready. We finally decided to copy a page and update the text to tell our traffic that we were under-development (instead of going to a 404) with only 4 minutes left. A minute before "Go-Live", I got the page up and running! It was such a thrill! Everyone was so happy. Crisis averted.

When my year was over. I had a conversation with the President of the company asking if I had earned the right to a pay increase as everyone there was making at least 2x my salary. I made my case, but he told me he couldn't do it. He didn't have the funds, and he didn't want to upset the seniority. Feeling spited, feeling my head hitting a glass ceiling, I gave them a notice that I would be leaving.

iOS Developer

After my leave, I took a cruise throughout the Caribbean, and a trip to Peru. Coming back, I needed a job, but didn't know how to get one, so I started attending Meetups. There was a tech Meetup at Tinkersmith's Makerspace.

Sidebar: If you don't know what a makerspace is, it's essentially like the concept of a gym, but for tools (ex. CNCs, belt sanders, rotary jigs, and all sorts of incredible nicknacks).

I met the owner, and asked him if he was hiring. Turns out that to keep the makerspace free, they ran a development shop during the day from that space, and they needed an iOS Developer. We agreed on a price of $35/hr and I was hired again!

It was so much fun! I would get to build virtual things during the day, and learn to build physical things during the night. After having had built my own iPhone app, it was so cool to jump into someone else's code. To see how "professionals" coded, to see how they organized dependent files. I learned so much about coding here, but also learned about entrepreneurship, running a business, and about the socio-political landscape of Charlottesville. A big plus was getting the chance to be in charge of my own schedule. Since I was payed hourly, I could show up when I wanted, as long as I did my work, ... and work I did.

I remember one moment, a couple days after the Apple Watch was announced, my boss got a call from a client asking if we could make them an Apple Watch app, in the next 5 days before a conference. He turned to me, asking if I would be interested in taking on the challenge? We only needed the appearance of functionality, but none of the backend and they'd pay us $10,000.

Of course!

I read up on what I needed, and how it worked, and in 2 days, we sent them the working prototype. I never did see any of the money though, but my boss and I got free Apple Watches from that ordeal. Score!

Near the end of the year, my boss told me he'd be closing up shop. He didn't like how much distraction we had from all our publicity. As the only free makerspace in the country, everyone wanted something and my boss just wanted to make things, not deal with people. I had just happened to be contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and shared the opportunity with my boss who encouraged me to go after it.

Designer + Front-End Developer

In the meantime, I was contacted by my old CvilleIT boss who was now working for a start-up called Moonlighting. They needed a Designer + UI/UX Developer and thought of me...perfect timing. I jumped on, and again, got to decide my schedule (Though I can't remember how much I got paid...)

I noticed the COO didn't know how to say what he wanted, but knew when he saw it, so instead of coming in at 9, like everyone else, I decided to start coming in around noon. I'd get some things together for a couple hours, and then pair with him to create the landing pages we needed for marketing, or wireframes for a mobile app until 8pm. Work was done sooo much faster this way.

After a month or so, seeing how much I knew about CSS and designing Design Systems, they invited me to Richmond to run an event they called a "Hot Box" . For a whole weekend, I'd be in a room with their developers and teach them everything I knew about CSS and how to architect styles and classes that are reusable, maintainable, and readable (laying the groundwork for the Tailwind precursor I'd make later). Room, and board was included.

A couple weeks later, I heard back from the recruiter...

Lead Designer (and Front-end Developer)

I ended up getting it, and becoming a Lead Designer for Fisher Auto Parts getting paid $76,000/yr. It was only a contract role for now, but I was moving on up! I officially had a title, and officially had a salary. Working there was so interesting. The automotive after-market industry is fascinating. I was having to think about how to display hundreds of thousands of items instead of focusing on websites that catered to one high profile personality. It also was much more rigid and heavy. With so many employees, and so many dependencies, everything had to work a certain way.

My first task was to align all of the pages to a common styling and for that I created a style guide. I quickly noticed, however, that my Front-End development skills would need to be utilized after reviewing pages that had been created by the developers drastically missed the mark. I realized they didn't know CSS, or HTML structures well enough to be able to follow my style guide. So I made the style guide able to be copied, and pasted into their code. Any new, or one-off components, I built out and sent over the code.

With the expansion of my role, I got to explore the capabilities of SASS (a more capable version of CSS) and built out my own columning system (not knowing about Bootstrap at the time...or being curious and stubborn...I remember not) and my own early version of Tailwind (which didn't exist at the time). I even created the ability for the entire website to be theme-ized, including a custom built SVG loading indicator. It was a shame that I had to leave all this work behind because I was really proud of it.

A Year and a Half of Travel

When my contract was over, I realized I could easily get lost in this rat race, and followed my urge to travel. I invested my money with someone, and lived off the proceeds. I travelled to 16 or so countries until I learned that the money was gone. Not only was it gone, but I was now also in debt from money I borrowed to pad my investment.

I ended up stuck in Europe, doing Workaways. One for an "exotic" hotel in the west of France which consisted of cabins made of twigs in the shape of bird nests. And another in the North, working on a Lusitanian Horse farm. I surprisingly had such a great time, I learned so much about different cultures, ways of thinking, livestyles, and industries.

I also learned how to live without money, and since I didn't have enough money to even get back to the states, I became essentially homeless. But this, itself, is a story for another day.

Mason

After making it back from being stuck in Europe, I needed a job, but I, again, didn't know what to do. I felt like my skills were expired. How could I explain this huge gap in my career? Who would hire this washout? I strangely didn't even feel like I could reach out to my old contacts (thinking they'd have forgotten about me). One of my soccer friends connected me with a friend he knew who ran a masonry company. I was hired for $12/hr.

As with all my jobs, I was fascinated. I got to learn about laying bricks, mixing and making concrete, cutting and laying stones. I also, as mentioned in System #15, got to learn lessons about running a business.

Carpenter

This same friend who connected me ended up getting a contract to build a hotel in Staunton and needed to assemble a crew. Since he knew that I had worked for a makerspace, and was good with my hands. He hired me away from the masonry gig, for $15/hr to become a carpenter.

When I was a kid, I wanted to become an architect, so I found myself gravitating to the architectural drawings every chance I got. I liked being able to translate them for the crew. I liked being able to engage the foreman, and solve the problems that arouse. I also just loved seeing what I built take shape. Seeing the levels of the hotel rise above the ground.

This, however, was one of the hardest periods of my life. Working manual labor, outside during the winter doing twelve hour days. I could never eat enough. I could never sleep enough. My fingers would get frozen to the drill, or hammer.

During this time, I was approached by another recruiter on LinkedIn recruiting for a position with The University of Virginia.

ServiceNow Developer

After a phone interview with the Project Manager, who had already heard of me and my skills through that same first boss, she helped me through my dreadful interviewing skills by prompting me with wonderful questions during the interview to showcase what she'd already heard.

I was back in business. I had secured a 6 month contract as a ServiceNow Developer working for an organization I had had a crush on since I was a child. I was now making $86,000/yr. What ServiceNow was, however, I did not know, but she was certain I could figure it out.

My task was simple, in theory; I was to migrate their old self-hosted website to ServiceNow's Service Portal. Not only that, they wanted me to update the site, like I had done at Fisher Auto Parts, except, they wanted it to look exactly the same...but better.

So here I was, learning the most complex system I had ever learned. Additionally, no one in the organization really knew how to develop on Service Portal, they only had vague ideas. I had to figure out what the system was capable of, and architect a solution to recreate their website, as is (but better), on this completely new system.

It was such a thrill. To keep my learning more rounded, my manager would send me unrelated tasks to complete within the system scratching the service of more undiscovered capabilities. One of the biggest challenges with this whole project was working with a client that wanted a certain thing to be done, but for me to not know if it was even possible in the first place. So they'd give me a request, and I'd have to investigate multiple ways to get the same thing done to see what worked best with the overall goal.

Since the articles were allowing HTML, I again built a style guide, but this time more akin to a build book - containing directions, How-to guides, and styles. These would be copiable by the content crew, and to make use of this functionality, I started teaching CSS classes for their crew as well as some of the developers like I had done for my previous job.

As the website went live, we started to get contacted by other world-class universities curious about how we had accomplished this feat. So I started teaching holding sessions with them to help them create their own. The website looked exactly the same, but better, as requested. Everything was more aligned, the CSS had been cut by two-thirds, and actually for once cascading (hence the C in CSS). But every item on the page was slightly better. Shadows were used to show depth or height, or to imply interactability and each HTML element had a purpose and hierarchy. We had to both keep the site accessible to the public (which we hadn't seen anyone be able to do before) and make it accessible for customers with disabilities.

To learn that, I was able to attend workshops about ADA compliance; building in the necessary compromises so that everyone could enjoy the site. I enjoyed learning about the complexities (and in some cases, simplicities) that came with building a site for everyone and being able to have an outlet for my learnings. I enjoyed having been given an enormous task, and having had accomplished it. I enjoyed being a bridge between the tech world, and content world – turning ideas into practical reality. But once my contract was over, and my job was done, funding for my role was in jeopardy. The ITS department formatted a deal with the Information Security (InfoSec) department that transition my expense from the ITS books to theirs. The transition, luckily, included a pay raise to $91,000/yr. and a signing bonus of $5,000 (which I learned quickly turned to ~$3,000 after taxes).

Web Application Defender - Information Security

During the transition, I needed training in Information Security so I was enrolled in a course called Web Application Defender which, though incredibly boring at times, had really amazing interactive parts. I got to learn how to compromise web pages through all sorts of little tricks, and utilizing speciality software like WireShark, and Postman. I started being able to notice vulnerabilities in so many applications around me and understanding how massive viruses like the MySpace bug had taken over.

Once my training was over, I was given a project to breath life back into, a pilot project that, like the website, had been stalled for 2+ years – the Web Application Firewall (WAF). My task was interesting, I had to meet with high security product teams around the university and figure out how to protect their traffic using the WAF. I had to learn what was their traffic versus malicious attacks and train the firewall to be able to automatically tell the difference. Some of those rules were super easy, others needed an expert touch.

When I became lead on this initiative, I quickly understood why everything had been in a standstill for so long. The way things had been run was by having the good ol' monthly meetings to gauge progress and get any inter-department blocks out of the way. The problem was many fold; this was a project added on top of their current intra-department work, the project wasn't high-priority since it was a pilot, and no one really understood it, or what was needed. All of these factors made the project easy to brush off. I decided I would just manually move the needle. I started meeting with the stakeholders individually to learn what they needed. I would meet with the Product team to understand their application. Then I'd work with my contact on the Network team to create the rules. If I ran into problems, or situations I didn't know how to handle, I'd get input from the InfoSec team. All of this progress would then be shared in a bi-weekly "newsletter."

I really enjoyed the fact that my role required me to meet with so many different people from all parts of the university. As I was doing that, I noticed that younger folks were, at that time, the minority of the workforce within the realms that I navigated. After speaking with one of my colleagues, we decided to start a weekly after-work meeting for all these new contacts. It quickly grew to 20 people, showing weekly to restaurants, bars, Carter's Mountain, or any place the group wanted to check out. These connections, I was told, brought joy back into people's work lives. Our Wednesday get togethers were the highlights of many people's weeks. I loved it. The people were SOOOO funny, we had such a good time. As my work expanded, I pulled more and more people in.

Once the pilot project was finished, I gave my report and told InfoSec that the customizability that we were looking for didn't exist within this product. It would require far too much manual work to implement as each of the applications we had tested it on had disparately different firewall rules. A week later, I was told by my boss that I would be let go since the funding for my project had dried up. To their credit, they gave me an extra month to complete a knowledge transfer of my work and navigate my network within the university for a new job.

There were many departments hiring, but nothing that paid as well as what I was making, or seemed that interesting. Each department was using outdated technology, and I didn't feel any pull towards any of them, so I let my time at the university expire.

Senior ServiceNow Developer

After 3 of the best months of my life (having money, a large social network, and no job), I was approached by another recruiter who made it through the noise by connecting me with a job where the boss at the time, was looking for "a good apple to help him right the ship." After an interview that was supposed to only be an hour, turned into a 3 hour conversation, I was sure this was the role I'd been looking for and I was quickly hired on as a now Senior ServiceNow Developer. I was now making $101,000!

Within the first two weeks, I got a chance to meet the team and understand the problems plaguing them. I was used to after-work social gatherings so I invited everyone out regularly, collectively, or individually. They knew the team was having trouble too, and they had so many ideas about what it was, and how to fix it. I was so excited to help make the team better, and help the boss understand what we could do to "right the ship."

There I was, finally getting a chance to update the boss, letting him know all the ideas that were proposed to me.

He stared back.

"Who the do you think you are?"

"What?"

"Who do you think you are coming in after two weeks to tell us how to run the show?"

...

I didn't even know what to do. As our meeting came to an end, I wasn't sure what had just happened. I quickly met with the team and told them about my interaction and proposed the idea that if we wanted to "right the ship." We'd have to do it ourselves.

We came up with little things at first that were bothering us, and made those changes. Then larger things. All the while, within each one on one, I'd tell the boss what we wanted to happen and why it was important, only to be berated. I'd go back to the team, and let them know what happened, and onwards we would go; step by arduous step. Halfway through my 6 month contract, two more hires joined us. They were AWESOME. We quickly shared with them what was happening and they were eagerly on board. The next 3 months, our movement started making larger and larger steps. While we had started out with morning meetings in which no one would speak until the boss jumped on, we now had people jumping on early to connect with each other. People were laughing, people were jovial, people were collaborating. I was so happy. We were starting to gel.

Then one day, at my one on one, my boss shared with me a problem he was noticing for the team and asked me...

"What do you think we should do?"

I pointed at myself, and looked behind me, to a closed door, just to make sure he wasn't talking to anyone else.

"You're asking me?"

"Yeah, what do you think?"

Before answering his question, I talked to him about how much it meant that he was even asking me. We reflected on how contentious our relationship had been, and I thanked him for having a change of heart. With our apologies in place, we discussed the problem. We had a great time, and we left it with the thought of asking the team for their input.

WHAT HAD JUST HAPPENED?

That night, I called my dad up to have dinner and I told him, "I think I'm done at Sentara. I don't know how, but I know that the winds are changing and I'll have another job soon." We spoke about what I wanted, and I told him I had been looking at other jobs, but never found anything that resonated. Jobs with job descriptions felt too limiting, I want to do more than the job description. I told him my next job would be a job without one.

Senior Software Developer...again

A month later, I was contacted by the CEO of NewRocket, who was looking for a Senior Developer like me. Since I had a job already, I asked every question I could muster about their culture, work ethic, or the structure of the company. Things like how they hired, or how they decided on pay, to how leadership has responded to grassroots change. Every answer that came back was exactly what I wanted to hear. I was enamored with the company. I was enamored with the culture. I was enamored with the people. At that time, NewRocket was almost evenly divided between men and women which hadn't been the case at any other job. People loved their jobs, and had made or led big changes. They had more than their roles, they had what people would call ownership (of the culture...not the company).

I was given a salary of $111,500, and no job description. What I would be doing was never brought up. So on the first day, I asked around,

"What should I do?"

"We were hoping you'd figure that out yourself."

What? Score! While I was figuring that out, they directed me to their training. Their training was really interesting, you could tell they had put some work into it. It progressively tasked you with making a Service Portal, complete with mockups, based on a client portal they had created a while back. The progression was cool, but the way everything was organized was lacking. You'd be in one Google Doc here, and another there, and besides not being able to find anything, no one would know how you had been progressing.

As my first task, after hearing they were planning to double in size in the next year, I asked if I could refactor their training. With all the new people, we'd need to be more efficient at training. I aligned everything to be located in one place, with ways to track your progress and a drip schedule of due dates so that HR and their managers could help shepherd the lost sheep, if needed.

By the time I was done with that, I noticed another problem. As is the nature of a consultancy, it creates a lot of code for different entities that is similar. If one company needs a calendar widget, chances are, others will need it too. To that end, the team, before I had gotten there, had created products to encapsulate those similarities. The problem was that they were frozen, there was no way to contribute to these products as living archives of our collective wisdom. The products were guarded by a gatekeeper, the CEO. With an incredibly high standard (which is a large part why the company was so successful) he'd rarely ever allow any functionality to be added to a product by someone else other than him.

I knew that as we grew, this would become our biggest problem. I had just fixed our training program which would hopefully create developers that would be worthy of contributing. Now, I had to convince the CEO to trust me. To his credit, he took a chance, and allowed me to build out a process that allowed any developer, no matter their status to contribute to the products. First, they'd have to explain their functionality, why it was important, how it had been generalized, as well as a deep, team-wide code review. To accomplish this, we set up a weekly meeting that would serve as the place to make your case and review the code. It became a highlight of our organization as it served doubly, not only as a code-review, but also as a weekly training. It would align our developers to best practices, and disseminate lessons learned while building a feature.

This single process created so much velocity in our company. Hours that had been wasted before were now being recycled to further our products. Functionality that had already been created for clients was no longer wasted code. But most of all, each piece of functionality we added, each bug we fixed served to raise the shoulders that we collectively stood on. Each time a product was enhanced, the starting line for client projects was moved up. Hundreds, if not thousands of hours were saved.

Next, I noticed that the Design team wasn't in the loop. They would be courting clients with mockups that were outdated, or selling functionality that wasn't possible. After speaking with the Director of Design, we decided to have three aspects for each client; the Product as it is via the web (the baseline), a mockup of the Product with the general additions the design team wants added (the Design System), and the client specific mockup that would be based of the Design System.

This would allow the Design team to build off of the functionality that already existed. Not only that, for our Custom work, we could have the client pay for the pieces that could be recycled into our product development. This made the company much more efficient. Our turnkey projects became so much more profitable. We were on fire!

I loved working with such exceptional people. I loved removing the blockages that hindered their passion and creativity. I loved making a difference in a company at a very high level. I loved affecting the bottom line, tangibly. I also loved our culture. I loved that I worked with and knew everyone in the company. I loved flying out to California and doing on purpose not to get a rental car. One, because it was expensive, but two, to have a reason to carpool with different colleagues. I loved bringing everyone together for parties, get-togethers like surfing, tennis, rock climbing, paintball, or steaks. I loved when everyone felt loved, supported, valued, and proud.

Senior ServiceNow Developer (ie. Lead Product Architect & Developer)

Then we heard that we'd be acquired by Highmetric, along with 5 other companies.

It was a shock, as a month or two earlier, we were told they would never sell. The good thing, for us, is it came with a pay increase. My pay went up to $121,000/yr with a $20,000 bonus and 1 share of equity (estimated to be valued at $45,000 once the company was resold in 3-5yrs).

We were also told that things would stay the same, but very quickly organizational change started. Our financial infrastructure had to all be combined. Our new sales team didn't know the products that each company had so our contracts started losing money. One reorganization led to another, each bringing more rules and silos. The team I had felt so close to felt so far away. It felt like the company had traded its soul for money.

Our profitable company quickly started losing money under the weight of its sinister financial shadow self which it now needed to support on top of all the extra pay. I could feel the problems building within the company. So I set out to help fix things, as I had done, but each time I built something, it would get destroyed by an new rule or policy. Everything that we had built with the product development process went the way of the Dodo bird. The product team which I led no longer had connections to any department...we were alone, and the ship was falling around us.

Six months into this catastrophe, I decided I needed to leave. I wasn't useful anymore, I felt like my invitation had expired. After conversations with my bosses, they tried finding other roles in the organization that I could transition to. One of them was working with the sales team to help them understand the products and our collective capabilities. I regret not taking that role. I instead chose to stay in my now small corner of the organization waiting for the tides to change. I didn't want to leave my bosses high and dry by transitioning, or losing my retention bonus by leaving but I should have.

During that time we had the chance to build a intranet for our own company which was actually really fun. It was the most advanced portal any of us had ever seen before, or ever made. One of my highlights of this time, was asking my boss' boss to give me something I could chew my teeth on. He detailed four problems, that until then, they had wanted to do but couldn't figure out how to do. After staring at the databases, and data structures, and getting a sense of the information I could work with, like I had done at UVA, I would sit outside staring at the clouds, piecing it all together. Within a week, I had solved three of the four problems. That was fun.

False promises led to more frustration. Losing good people. Another reorganization. Finally, I told my bosses I was going to travel. I would be on everyday, but to let me know when we finally had the go ahead to start building again. During my travels, it occurred to me that since we had just added a whole piece of our team in India (none of which I'd met before), I was gonna make my way there and share my knowledge with the next group of people. I contacted them, and made arrangements. Some of the team was coming from 8 hours away to get together in our offices in Pune.

Five days before meeting up with everyone, I was told that I wasn't allowed to do anything work related while in India. All the plans had to be cancelled. I was so disappointed. The boss in India, however, decided to take time off and show me around his home town. We spent a couple days together and I got to know an incredible man who had created an incredible company. During lunch time, we video called team members, and I got to know how diverse and deep their skills were. What a shame we couldn't collaborate!

After making it back to San Diego, on my way back home, and setting up one last party, I arrived home to find out that they were terminating my position. What a wild journey! I should not have stayed that long, but I learned so much about the impact of acquisitions, the impact of merging companies together, and the swiftness with which work cultures can be lost.

Real Estate Investor

That same week I was let go, my older brother's was also terminated from his company. He called me with a proposition to fix up an old house he had bought for $35,000 six years before. We finally had both time, and money.

He needed an investor to cover the costs of repairs, so we teamed up. What we originally thought would take a month and a half, quickly became 4+ months. Every time we tried to fix something, it would reveal something else that was broken, or rotted, or wrong. We did everything ourselves except for installing a brand new HVAC system, and I'm so glad we hired that out.

We overshot our budget of $25,000 and spent $38,000. Fortunately for us, however, the house we thought we'd sell for $125,000, we were able to sell for $170,000 (though we had to pay closing costs).

After all the dust settled, and everyone took their part, we only made $20,000 together between two of us when we factored in the back taxes, accrued unpaid interest, closing costs, broker fees, materials, taxes, and the HVAC. We were pretty disappointed. I can't imagine if we'd have sold it for $125,000...

Odd Jobs

While looking for my next role, I decided to try odd jobs. I picked up a job at the Charlottesville Airport as a Ramp Agent for $15/hr. Working at the airport is fascinating. Long have I looked out of the plane windows thinking that I'd love to have the chance to work at an airport someday, and here I was. I get to drive all the big vehicles, and understand how airlines actually work. And for 9hrs a week, I get to have free flights. Those nine hours, however, require me to wake up at 3:15am...

I also had a foray as a Waiter/Cook at Bulpan Korean BBQ. Usually, in Korean BBQ, the waiter brings the meats, veggies, and banchan (sides) and you cook your own food. At Bulpan, however, we do the cooking for you. Not just for one table, but 3, 4, 5, or even sometimes 6, for the best waiters. Working there, I learned to be better at fast paced, multi-focused work. With multiple grills to man, drinks to refill or create, dishes to clear or bring, this job is leagues more difficult than waiting itself. The good thing is that we'd regularly take home about $25/hr though some nights that could go up to $50 or $60/hr.

During this time, I also did handyman work (per project ~$50/hr), and continued website development ($125/hr) or volunteering my time for a couple startups, and writing this blog.

I'm so grateful for the journey I've had. I've learned so much along the way, and met so many incredible people. But I'm still searching for my next thing. I know I'm young, and there's many more pages left in my journey. I don't know what they hold, but I know they'll be pages that are gonna be worth every turn...and I'm so excited to live them...