[partisan]

I was working as a .NET Developer (still do), but around 2010, I was neck deep in a codebase that was passing around DataSets, stuck in VB.NET, no real leveraging of code. I interviewed for Amazon and tanked miserably, which was a wake up call for me as I wasn't aware how much I had let my skills slip.

I knew I had hit something of a low point so I started learning on my own again outside of work. I picked up several non-MS languages and technologies which helped me to understand better how I should be using the MS stack. I eventually found DDD, CQRS, distributed computing, and other concepts that colored my design perspective. I petitioned for, and through threat of leaving, got the department permission to use C# and I started to refactor code when I touched it.

It was a tough road. I sometimes didn't have patience with myself, but I started counting the little victories and kept going from there.

I am currently learning front-end frameworks, ES6, and Typescript. Nobody asked me to. I just know I will learn something in the process that I can apply in the future even if I never get a job related to this tech.