Struggles with Finding a Job
I had no idea it'd be this hard to find a new job. Others with a lot less experience are finding jobs faster. In fact, a lot of folks that got laid off from PEAK6 have already found jobs. Yet I haven't. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's just not my time. I really don't know, but it's certainly a test of faith to keep my spirits up in these trying times.
It's effected my writing here, that's for sure. I had no idea how much it might be effected, and for a few days there, I was back on track - writing code for an iOS/OS X library and having a lot of fun with XML-RPC and PHP. It's not that I thought it'd be a million dollar idea, but it was a lot of fun getting into ARC in OS X 10.7 and seeing how it plays out as opposed to the old retain/release work that I've been used to using on OS X.
There was also a lot of fun learning the ins and outs of the XML-RPC implementation built-in to PHP, and how simple it was to really make something quite powerful and easy to use. Lots of fun.
But then I pretty much ran out of ideas to keep myself busy.
Sure, I added a few new lockless data structures to DKit, and that was nice - but without a common thread library, I can't really go a lot further with this library. I'm not going to attempt the lockless list or map - Intel's TBB already has those. And there's no reason to create a spinlock - boost and TBB have them already. So I'd just be duplicating code from someone that's probably done a lot more work on it than I have.
So I'm trying to find something to make the time pass quickly between calls to recruiters and waiting to hear back from companies. I know it'll end soon. I have faith that this can't go on forever. It's just making the best of a bad time that's challenging.
I'm glad I at least have the faith.