0008 – A Lot of New

It's incredible to read my last post, which now seems so long ago. It's exciting how much has changed but also a bit disheartening that in terms of the goal of this site I'm no closer.

Let's talk about the good things – I got married! Planning the wedding and honeymoon took up a substantial part of my free time. My wife and I took a luxurious one month honeymoon after the wedding, so there's a literal 1/12th of the year where there was no hope of learning to program.

Second big change: I switched jobs! I moved from working at a small post production house in Hollywood to now working on a team at Adobe helping to make the very same software that I used to use every day. So far, I'm loving it! I had thoughts in my head for a while about potentially jumping into something like working for Adobe so that I could stay in the world of post production but also get a leg into software development. I'm still pinching myself as I don't think I could have asked for a better opportunity.

So, now every day I'm around some pretty fantastic developers tackling hard problems and I'm starting to live and breathe software development.

As exciting as that is, I am also very aware that it would be easy to work at this position for 10 years and not make any progress in learning code. My job title is Software Quality Engineer which simply means I test and break and find the problems in either the shipping version or upcoming new features as they're added. The closest I'm required to come to code is sometimes pouring over crash logs.

So, now that I'm back from wedding/honeymoon bliss I'm diving head first into this. The good part is that learning to code can't hurt my current job, and in fact there are more advanced parts of the Quality Engineer position that involve building automated test systems. My boss has encouraged me to get my feet wet with this to start programming.

Doing so would involve learning Python and so that's my new starting point. I've always been told that if you're going the self taught route it's better to have a goal or project you work towards rather than trying to thoroughly learn a language in an academic sense. Every day I have to download at least 2 new builds from Adobe's servers so I can test the daily build on macOS and Windows. So, my goal is to write myself a script that I can kick off that will handle that for me, and maybe even the installation!

Wish me luck!