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.)

So, the network is back. But they wiped all of yesterday's work from the servers. And the mail server is running slower than a disabled snail and has reinstated all the crap that we deleted yesterday.

But the best bit is losing all of the work yesterday. Essentially, I now have to redo around six hours of work just to be back at the place where I left yesterday. Can anyone point out why I should have bothered to come in yesterday?

I am very proud of myself - I actually managed to get to work at a ridiculously early hour that is apparently the usual Monday start. If I can do this, then I should be able to do the rest of the week.

I'm also going out tonight to a folk concert. This might be my downfall: I suspect that I will be absolutely shattered by the time I get home. So glad that I'm not driving :-) It's also rather chilly here and I'm hoping that I don't freeze too much while I'm out.

Sadly, I haven't had time to design a suitably offensive graphic to replace the hotlinked one, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. Grrr. I'll be delving into the secrets of .htaccess for a more permenant solution, but for now I'm just going to rename the graphic file and add a graphic with a suitable message under the old filename. Hopefully that should take care of that little twerp :-)

Wolf sent out a mailing today including details of SG-11 next November. Leaving aside completely the fact that I didn't think they'd run another, who do you think is the guest they've announced?

Why, yes, it is Teryl Rothery *BFG*

Um, is anyone out there remotely interesting in attending this event? *cringes* I know that I said no more SG cons, but...

I am so weak and shallow.

Of course, I had to pop over to the Wolf site to see whether there had been any more guest details for SG-10 and happened to notice that Neil Denis is now scheduled to appear (aw) and they've obviously been listening to yragg because Alex Zahara is also on the list. No Teryl though. Not that I was hoping for that or anything...

Ahem.

Third day and still not dead. Got to do a bit of SQL programming and some analysis today, which I enjoyed - most interesting day so far. Still can't get myself excited about the stuff that I'm analysing, but I did enjoy writing some nice, moderately complex SQL. I even got some nice "aha's" from the guy keeping an eye on me because I'd aliased the incredibly long table names and used some neat code. Aren't I the geek?

*flail*

Very tired, but my first day hasn't killed me. Everyone seems alright and I'm currently suffering from data overload on names, things and procedures, but I'm feeling much more relaxed about this job than I was. So far, the only big hiccough was the commute, but I'll be starting earlier tomorrow so should hopefully miss some of the traffic problems that killed me this morning - none of them on the motorways. It was the roundabouts on the A roads that were thoroughly insane and the motorways were lovely. Huh. The drive home was a doddle :-)

I've read all the comments and will reply to them tomorrow when I'm feeling more sane. Just one quick favour - does anyone out there have a spare Gmail invite that they'd be willing to put my way? Work hasn't managed to set up an email account for me yet and I need to set up a neutral web email account (in other words, one not attached to my Selenay ID) so that we can work around this minor lack. If anyone does have a spare invite, could you send it to selenay 936 at btinternet . com (remove all spaces and replace 'at' with '@', obviously *g*). It will be very gratefully received.