[Note To Self]

[adjective] content • complacent • satisfied

One of the first things I did after getting laid off was take a few days for myself. I needed to get my bearings, and I needed to mourn.

After that? It was a scramble. Pack up the work laptop, ship it out. Clear my work desk. It would take me a month before I could work at it again. Update resume. UPDATE. RESUME.

Yeah, I hadn’t really touched it since I got hired back in 2018. It took a while to piece everything together, and then I sent it off to my village for input, advice, etc. They have been fantastic. I was reaching out to them as soon as I was let go. Their support was the first thing that I needed.

I turned my attention to my portfolio. That’s when I realized that I had done most of my dev work on my work laptop. I had not kept my dev environment up to date on my personal laptop, and it was a mess. My first laptop was a MacBook Pro that I had bought specifically for The Iron Yard’s program. It was a 15-inch monster. I traded it in for the 13-inch M1 sometime in 2020. I was in the habit of transferring my backup to the new machine vs. a new setup. On the M1, Homebrew installs files into the /opt/homebrew/ folder, which is not part of the default shell $PATH. Yeah, I banged my head repeatedly trying to get that sorted out.

All that work, and I ended up neglecting the portfolio again. That should have been at the top of the list, but I don’t have a good reason for why I put that work on the side. I am trying not to feel overwhelmed looking at it and trying to plan out what I’m going to do with it. Do I stick with Ruby on Rails? Do I put some React and Javascript projects in there? What projects do I even PUT in there?!

I keep telling myself not to panic. Take it one step at a time. I can’t help but think about how things would have been if I had maintained my resume and my portfolio while I was still working. I got comfortable and lazy.

Another hard-learned lesson.