Selenay's Ramblings

It's all official now, so I can announce this publicly - I have accepted an amazing job offer!

I'll be working in central London for a travel company as a data engineer. I start on July 30, so I've got a couple of weeks to get settled (and decompress and visit people) before I need to start.

The job is pretty much everything I wanted in a job. Great tech stack (Google cloud platform, most of their data warehousing is on BigQuery, lots of other nice tech), good people, interesting new industry. I'll be doing a mixture of data analysis, building dashboards/self-serve tools, revamping their ETL etc. so it's going to be an interesting role. I'll be their first data engineer (their data work has been done by people as side projects and "when there's ten minutes spare" until now) so there's going to be lots of room to shape the role and really make an impact. They have a dedicated training/conference budget for each person, Friday afternoons are reserved for non-project work (learning stuff, building a new tool because you think it'll be good to do - whatever seems like a good use of the time), and they seem to really invest in their people.

And the compensation package is pretty nice, too :-)

I told Boss S this morning and he's been really supportive and lovely, so that's brilliant. We're going to tell the team on Thursday in our regular team meeting, and then everything will be out in the open properly. My last day in my current role will be June 29.

But guys, I've found a super awesome new job! I'm not jumping off a cliff into the unknown when I move - there's a job waiting there for me! They're happy to wait until July 30 for me to start and they're actually excited and impressed by me? It's such a weird and amazing feeling. The work sounds interesting. The people I've spoken to have been lovely and I get a good feeling about working with them. The office is in a great location for my commute and they're flexible about start/finish times, plus they support working from home once a week.

And I get really really cool toys :-)

This whole "move back to England" plan is turning out to be an even better decision than I'd expected. I'll be back with my family, back home, and now I'm getting to make a fantastic career move, too. I'm so thrilled about all this :-)

(And yes, it's the job where I thought I'd screwed up the interview. Impostor syndrome is real, guys.)

I'm about fifty pages from finishing Harry and thoroughly enjoying it, although knowing that it will be two years before I get any more Harry makes these last pages hard. Damn, I get too attached to fictional characters *g*

Job search stuff has actually taken off rather surprisingly this week. I did my usual trawl and apply cycle on Wednesday, except within half an hour of sending off CVs for two positions the agencies advertising them got back to me. Huh. One is now actively looking for work for me and promises to call next week. We'll see. The other has put me forward for the position that I applied for and it looks like a really exciting one. Yay! Just gotta wait to see whether anything comes of it. But this week I've had far more response to my attempts than I had for weeks before. Hmm.

Obviously I was applying to all the wrong adverts before.

The new trackball arrived yesterday and was installed today. It's very beautiful. It's cordless. No longer is it's location determined by wire-length, forcing me to stretch forward to reach it. Now it's sitting comfortably right next to me and I now have to get used to having it so conveniently placed. The cursor speed is also much faster and whizzier than the old one. The buttons even click! And stay clicked when pressed! Woo! No more losing files mid-drag for me *g* It took me a few minutes to get the wheel button programmed to do as I wished (i.e. interact with Firefox the way I wanted), but I'm now a very happy trackball owner.

I took the new bow out for her maiden voyage last night and she's gorgeous. Scored 453 on a short junior national round, giving me a handicap of 70 - down from 73. Woo! Next week I'm going to shoot at a longer distance, which could be fun. My score will go down, but the handicap system takes distance into account so theoretically my handicap shouldn't increase again. Yeah, theoretically 20m shouldn't be any easier than 30m, too, but those theories don't always work out. But the bow is beautiful and shoots better than the club bow, so who cares? The real fun will come in the indoor season when I'll be able to see a real improvement over my performance in last year's indoor season :-)