Friday the 14th of October was my last day at Highforge. Just half a month shy of 4 years I am resigning my position there to take the next step in my career. A career that has, thusfar, lacked definition. I’ve always been a bit of a “jack of all trades” and if I described my position at Highforge otherwise I’d just be kidding myself. It’s probably also a trait that will never completely disappear (I know what I know, if I can use it to help out then why the hell wouldn’t I?).
But throughout the years there has always been one aspect, the “red thread” as they’d call it in Dutch, that has been present and a guiding factor in everything I do. The thread that started in college, vastly expanded in my first job as web developer at Greenvalley (Team EH&T represent) and carries on in my everlasting self-development as frontend developer. This aspect is, of course, accessibility.
The next chapter of my career will take me to the company that, quite literally, wrote the books on WordPress. It will also allow me to continue my efforts on making the web a better place one site at a time. Starting today (Monday the 24th), I will be a Front End developer on the WebdevStudios team (and by Tuesday afternoon I will probably be so humbled I will be in the fetal position in a corner of the room somewhere, questioning any confidence I had in my skills – hashtag imposter syndrome).
I won’t lie, this has probably been the most difficult decision in my life. It’s the first position I’ve resigned without an extraordinary circumstance backing me up (my first ever developer job I had to resign due to moving to the US and things kind of take care of themselves at that point). Not to mention that it’s the first US job I’ve resigned (I don’t know how you guys do things over here, it’s pretty anxiety-inducing at times). And to top it off, the timing for it was probably the worst ever, but I won’t get into detail on that.
In the end, I think things were handled pretty gracefully and I’m thankful that I was able to get the time I needed to get all the important stuff handed over to my successor. Just like I’m thankful for the wonderful times at the one company that decided to take that chance to bring on that weird Dutch guy that only just got his work permit (didn’t even have a green card yet at that point, paperwork for that took waaaay longer to process). It’s definitely greatly appreciated.
And with that, I will leave you with this. Onward, for the glory of Helm (this link will lead to a Wikipedia article about Helm, a deity in the game D&D)!