Posted on: 14/04/2017

Wooooo!

After a few interviews towards various Haskell roles, I got rejected from all of them! F@$K. I think I nearly succeeded with a few of them. I kind of wished I would have waited till I acquired more hands on experience with Haskell, but it was already SO long since I started learning it, that I just wanted some feedback to know what the“Haskell ecosystem” looks like and the expectations. I can’t say I’m disappointed.

So I’m on Plan B - full time freelance. I’ve been doing some freelance work for nearly 5 years now - so I’m not really new to the whole practice, but having to take it on full time was a bit of challenge. Initially, I even had second thoughts about the whole thing, I thought I may have underestimated things. I definitely got quite emotionally invested in all the new potential clients early on, and it took a toll when things didn’t work out as planned. A gray day here or there.

But I’ve got a fairly steady pipeline of work now thankfully! At some point, I realized I just have to keep working on things, speak to clients - and everything would just get better from there. It just took some time (2/3 weeks) to get “good” at it. The change of mindset has been amazing and it has filled me with a bunch of confidence.

I’m not totally sure in the direction I’m heading it’s a mix of :

• Build a stronger clientele
• Try to introduce useful new tech in existing projects / new projects
• Expand my technical knowledge
• Work on some business ideas

Get into some mainstream FP language (Scala / F# / Clojure) (non - freelance route) It’s great working from home though! My schedule is still a bit chaotic - but I’m sure this will settle down. It also means I can take a long lunch break / have a cycle / play a game of chess - it’s been so long since I’ve had a day where I felt I didn’t get enough sleep.