Day 7: The craft
Day 7
Whew! Today started at 12:01 a.m. this morning (ish) when my 6-year-old son said that his ear was hurting him really bad, so bad in fact that he couldn’t sleep. Both my wife and I grabbed our chests for our broken hearts! Our son has such a soft and tender voice when he is hurting. We found a Walgreens near our hotel and I got the privilege of driving my son on a late-night drive to Walgreens for ear medicine. He came with me so that he could get the ear drops in faster than waiting for me to return. It was an odd night, but I cherished the alone time that I got with him regardless. The ear drops worked like a charm and he fell asleep within 5 minutes after the drops went in.
We woke up sort of late and enjoyed a mostly covered breakfast (we tipped) because our membership covered $20 of breakfast. My wife and I ate ham sandwiches back in the room for breakfast 😂 The $20 was spent on our boys’ French toast and Cheerios. That memory will be a forever memory; nothing like mayo and mustard after a semi-terrible night of sleep! I joke, but in all seriousness, that is what memories are made of. It’s also where all good adventures start, outside of the norm.
Because I woke up so late and because we went to breakfast immediately, I didn’t have time to work this morning. I had planned on waking up and using the awesome business center that the hotel had, but instead I sadly waved goodbye to it as we checked out early. Next was the splash pad and then we drove home (OH and we got two free french fries from Chick-fil-A and a free drink from points and a coupon). Those are God’s calories, so we’re not counting those towards any of our fitness goals ;)
As far as unemployment progress goes, I have spent a large part of the time in my head today going over what God may be preparing us for. In the waiting and the worry, if you’re quiet enough, God will speak to you. How? It depends on you, dear reader. But for me, the Holy Spirit has nudged two things my way. One is personal, so I won’t share it here; the other, though, is professional.
The craft. I had an interview this past week where I chatted a little bit about the “ideal engineer” and part of that ideal was excellence in the “craft” of software/programming/tech/etc. It stuck with me for some reason. So, today I started up my Code Kata on CodeWars.com and started taking on challenges. It is good! I have forgotten, perhaps in the agentic culture nowadays, how fun it is to attack seemingly useless problems like “change all letters in the string to ‘(‘ if they appear once or ‘)’ if they appear > once”. I also realized that I need to more regularly harness and sharpen my craft. That, I believe, will be a true standout quality as AI development progresses.
I also applied to two jobs today, both of which I’m pretty excited about. I can’t wait to hear anything back from the applications that I’ve put in. So far, I’ve been denied twice, both from the same company for two different positions. My interviews have been from direct recruiter connections, not from applications that have been reviewed and accepted. It is an incredibly odd process, application submissions are. You toss your life’s work and some clever cover letter prose into the ether and you MAYBE sometimes not always will get a response. Then, when the response is a “No,” you get no feedback—but there’s no blame game here. If I reviewed thousands of applications, I couldn’t give personalized feedback either.
God bless you, my reader. I hope He moves in your life in extraordinary ways today and in the days to come.