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by graememcc 4039 days ago
This will be me soon. I have to move out of my flat in 3 weeks, and have nowhere to go. The future's not bright. It's my fault, the result of determined head-in-sand burying. No sympathy is due.

I've been living off my savings, with the aim of pivoting to a programming career after years post university stuck in under-employment. My aim was to build up a folio of work in lieu of the paucity of experience on my CV.

I continued to contribute to various pieces of Mozilla: if you're running Firefox, you're running code I've written, and I managed to build an internal web app that is now considered a fairly critical piece of their internal infrastructure. Other successes included micropolisJS, my SimCity 89 in Javascript port. Others like my functional library funkierJS and my fresh rewrite of V8Monkey/SpiderNode I've not yet managed to get over the finish line.

But as my savings dwindled, I refused to accept it, and focussed on how I'd easily claw my way back out when I landed a good position.

Even in the past year, when I've been barely hanging on, I stupidly refused to accept reality. I've lived on one meal of lentils for about 9 months or so - shedding 6 stone has been nice; it would have been nicer if it had been in a healthy controlled manner. The mobile phone is long gone, and with it my world, and my friend's list shrank considerably. And still I wouldn't accept the position I'd dug myself in.

And now, here we are. My landlord's patience is exhausted. No wonder. In 2 and a half weeks, I become the perverse dual of the homeless guy who learned to code: I know how to code but have sank the other way. There's no friend's sofas or family to bail me out, though that seems fair - I should face the consequences. At best I might get an emergency hostel with the heroin addicts and alcoholics, although my city has a reputation for failing to meet its legal obligations to the homeless.

And I did this to myself, the architect of my own demise.

Apologies for the wall of text. It was, at least, a little cathartic.

1 comments

You have quite the wonderful portfolio for a guy who is learning to code. What is stopping you from getting a job when developer demand is so high?
Initially, I was convinced I hadn't done enough to be a convincing candidate. Recently, more prosaic reasons: no mobile phone, no website (can't afford the hosting), can't afford a haircut or suit dry-cleaning for attending interviews...