This post was migrated from my original Jekyll site with little to no modification. Weird formatting (and general prose cringe) is to be expected.Sorry.
This has been by far the most challenging few weeks in my professional life. I understood cognitively that I was facing a crossroads in my evolution as a player and as a man, and that it came with exceptionally difficult choices. What I didn’t truly understand, however, was the range of emotions I would feel during this process.
Being the sole technical IC at Viewify was a lot of fun work. I learned a lot about what makes building fun and especially what can make building NOT fun. Creating something from the ground up can be really rewarding in and of itself, but throwing what you’ve built into the trash can and going back to the drawing board takes a different kind of grit (or maybe just stubbornness? confidence?).
Safe to say, I found my hard limits in terms of what I am willing to contribute when I’m no longer intrinsically motivated by the thing I’m building. Rather late than never as they say.
I love tinkering. I’m a tinkerer right now. The most fun I’ve had doing small consulting projects are ones where I get to tinker with an existing website or platform, with very few stakes involved. Low-to-no stakes are cool, but I think at this point I’m only exacerbating my ADHD/ other keep-scrolling-inflicted brain damage by doing this.
Finding something meaningful to work on is easy. Doing that for the long-haul, especially after flaming out the last time I did so is hard.
I signed up for AngelList a little while back (was introduced when we were raising at Viewify and looking for investors + potential first-hires). A local Atlanta startup called MaxRewards reached out to me; I honestly was a little nonplussed1 since the founder reached out directly with a code challenge (free labor = eurgh), but I found that the challenge was actually pretty fun and required scratching parts of my hacker brain that I hadn’t touched in a while.
Needless to say, I’m joining the Golden State Warriors MaxRewards as a full-time, full-stack engineer. The problem space is interesting, the team seems fun (there’s only 3 of us! again!), and everyone is at least technical enough that I can actually argue database design and not feel like I’m talking to a brick wall.
Let’s see how it goes.
NOTE
I’ve actually uploaded the code challenge I did for MaxRewards to my GitHub. You can check it out here.
in the modern sense. English is awful ↩
