It’s been quite a couple of months, enough to fill this entire page in just one post. Life has now taken an entirely different pace, and the past year feels very distant. So here you get the short story.

It all started a couple of months ago – I lost my car. We still own it, but dad’s car finally gave up the ghost, and as he paid for my car, and it’s insurance, and because he required one to get back and forth work, he took mine. I couldn’t exactly argue, as all I only used it on weekends. Not having a car is quite a leg-breaker at the best of times, but this time it was a stark reminder that I literally have nothing to my name, in fact, if everyone was to call in repayments, I would be considerably in debt (personally, £1,000 in debt is something I consider very bad, let alone the rest).

So, the old way of life couldn’t continue. I could no longer afford to spend 6 months developing something only for it to be side-tracked and move on to something else – too many “start something, never finish”. On top of that, there is no getting anywhere without money, and 3 pages of bank statements of outgoings and no incomings was heading for a distaster very quickly. The only income I was getting was about 60p a week from adsense, which, as soon as I even had a tin of fish for lunch, for one day, was outdone.

So, I went to monster.co.uk, and put up a CV. One company however, gave a job description which stood out amongst the others – a company which seemed was looking exactly for the skills I most excel in. So I applied, chased up, and was soon granted an interview, which went very well. The next day, the job was mine. The next week, I was to start.

So, it started. It’s an upstairs, rather open office layout with each developer getting a large corner desk each. Everyone gets along nicely. Everyone works together nicely. The teams work well, and the day is very productive. A small sales team sits in the corner with an endless list of phone calls which continues to suprise me – they themselves are not developers, but they sound very enthusiastic about what we do. Every call feels like a pat on the back to the developers, who are really the wheels of the vehicle – hard workers, carrying a lot of weight, but who gets the entire vehicle to their goal.

The first week was a mix of dissapointment and suprise – I was dissapointed, they were suprised. I thought I was working very slow, but at the end, they revealed that they gave me the site no one else wanted to do because it was so hard. They expected at least a week, but I did it in 3 1/2 days, including learning their system, their libraries, and packages. The suprise rests with them – the people who looked as if they paid a fiver for a £100 ring. On top of that, the job pays very well – far higher than most university leavers get, often in the same decade they left. It was the first job I applied for, and the first to give me an offer. It is reasonably local, and a very powerful company whose founders shared the same visions I did all this time – they have their own private yacht, have spread to many cities worldwide, yet still feel somewhat small – as if each staff member is valued, rather than just a swarm, replacable at the drop of a coin. They are doing an all-expenses-paid three course formal meal for christmas, and have generous holiday allowance. On top of all that, in 6 weeks I could very well be promoted to the “bespoke” team, which is the very nitty-gritty development, and pays even more, and is more what I want to do.

One thing is very important to mention – university did not get me here. The skills the company were after were not covered in any module, even in the third year. University very slightly touched on PHP and MySQL but at such a basic level, that it won’t even blip a company’s radar. If you want to get anywhere you need to show a passion for it – you need to learn at your own initiative outside of education.

It’s certainly not games development, but it pays the bills, and then some. It does not feel like a drag going to work on a monday morning. Team work is very rewarded, and people share similar interests, generally. It has also not stopped me getting on with my own work at home, especially when dad actually gets a car, which would spare me three hours a day of extra travelling (his job is along the motoway in the opposite direction, past roadworks and another large town’s traffic).