Mark Hernandez

Year in Review - 2019

Last year was wild all around.

Since I graduated from UNL December 2018, I was relieved of one source of constant anxiety. Although, I didn't have a job lined up beforehand, so I was pretty much scrambling to find interviews here in Omaha.

After about 2 months of searching and sending resumes, I was hired at National Indemnity Company. It was exciting to start my first full-time job, but I knew that I wasn't working with the latest technologies. Regardless, I did gain skills and techniques for working with legacy codebases.

Months passed, and I still felt like my already developed skills weren't being put to good use. I knew git and git workflows. I knew about writing pure/semi-pure functions and unit testing them. I knew so much modern JavaScript features and knew that they would never be used here. Obviously I was nit-picking what I didn't like, but I was really concerned about falling behind the rest of the industry.

Additional factors at work eventually led to my decision to find work elsewhere. Luckily, Derek Waskel, an old classmate of mine, reached out to me for a position at gWorks. It felt strange to leave a place only after 8 months, but I felt this was the best choice to make. I've been really satisfied being a part of the team here.

Last year, I wrote goals did not really meet them. To be fair, they were extremely vague and I had less free-time to focus on them. I've actually stopped having new year resolutions and opted towards a lookback approach; hence, this post. No one can tell the future, and I don't feel like disappointing myself with arbitrary goals.