Prepping for a seven hour interview

Yes.  

Seven

Count them.  S-E-V-E-N  hour interview.  In one day.  One company.  One office.  It's coming up this week.

I have two other phone interviews this week.  Last week I had three, four, including two face to face.  NEVER schedule yourself for two face to face (f2f) in one day.  

Only book one interview, be it phone or in person, per day.  You just can't shift the focus that fast.  You're not in any familiar territory.

Right now, I've got one hiring manager trying to put together a req for a job for me based upon my skills.  Another hiring manager who said I was overqualified for his position has shopped my resume around to THREE other managers in the company.  I've loved everyone I've met there so far.

I continue to get my best call backs from recruiters who've found me via key words on either dice or cybercoders.

I'm excited about the all day interview.  The lineup is seriously intimidating - from a V.P., to "chief data scientist", to CTO... It kind of reminds me of the McCaw days.  I've gone back to look at those old McCaw values.  There was never any touting of hiring "only the best," but "hire and develop great people."  We're all great, in our special ways.  

I wrote in my four page essay that got me this seven hour interview, "I'm not the best.  I'm only damned good."  And really, I am.  I've worked with people so much smarter than I am, those who are so very talented.  I've enjoyed learning from them.  

We took a roadtrip, me 'n Dave 'n our dog named Blue - drove across the mountains to Montana and visited family.  Drove north to Sandpoint, Idaho on roads we've never travelled before.  We're traveling roads we've never gone down before right now.

Done

But there are only 28 out of 70 prints which are "perfect."  This has been a fascinating process, from hand laying the type, learning to cut the block prints and then the printing process itself.  The platen letter press I worked with is one shown in the picture below.  It could easily have taken an 8x11 sheet of paper, much less the 4x6.

I went with the slightly embossed texture, not the perfect "kissed the paper" because, well, this is my very first project and there are so many problems with many of the prints, but I love this texture.  I wanted it in at least one of my prints, in one of my editions.  I wanted the texture, the feel.

Letterpress project for Nettlesting Press

Of course, me being me, I've started a project which is Over The Top.  I've hand set my piece, "As I Lie Here" for a first edition of hand-crafted cards from Nettlesting Press.  There is, of course, finished back to the card and you see the block I'm cutting out for that below.  The upper right is the printed front page layout including the hand-pressed proof of the poem.  

8 point type... I've gotten good setting type, moving type.  Sheesh...  There's only going to be 50 cards.  The poem is below.

As I Lie Here With You

(inspired by the photograph “As I Lie Here With You” by Elise Koncsek)

As I lie here with you

                                       stretched out against

the length of your warm back, it is the bow

of your ear that I love most in this moment.

Its pink shell illumined by first light guarantees

your heart's beat, but is it more graceful

than the climb of the curve from the back

of your neck to the arc of your shoulder?

Could it be more closely remembered

than the texture of your morning scruff

as it rises stiff and rough on the slope

of your jaw  - a promised scrape which

redden my cheeks for hours after the first

of your kisses?

          Morning awaits - a grey,

indistinct door before us.  You will wake,

stand, walk toward the light, away

from me buried in my mourning.

je ne regrette rien

The cycle is swooping back up again and today I feel like I've made another "break-through" in this transition process.  I don't know why I didn't notice this before, maybe I thought it was too far beyond me, but there's this whole industry building up around performance engineering for software development in mainstream IT.  I've got an interview - not because they picked my resume out of the slush pile, but because a friend forwarded my resume to a recruiter, who forwarded me to the hiring manager.  The hiring manager asked to speak to me, so he's read my resume.  I meet with him in the next few days, so I am brushing up on what I don't know based upon the job description.

I sorted the job description into what I knew (and why I applied) and pulled out what I didn't know.  This time though, instead of ignoring the software I didn't know, I went to their websites and viola.  There was some fan-fuckin'-tastic technical documentation about IQA  (Integrated software quality assurance) tools and what that is.  I feel like I hit paydirt.

The best, however, by far is the Dynatrace site.  Not only do they describe what application performance is and how it hits bare metal, but there's an extensive section on cloud KPIs worth reading for those who still aren't impacted by having to get down to the application layer.  That said, I think application performance management and performance testing is going to be part of "everyone's" future.  This site, and others have a lot of very interesting information.

Keyword search guys is "Application Performance" - there's testing and best practices, you want to pay attention to.  Also, you want to watch for "Continuous Integration" these days, folks.

Here's the Microsoft link to their document.

*****************************************************

My favorite pickle guy asked me how the job search was going yesterday.  I sighed, "Have you done much dating before?"

He nodded.  Of course he has, he's a cutie and smart and funny.

"I've had a lot of first  dates.  You know what that's like, right?  How easy those are?"

<insert nod, but confused look here>

"Now, how many second dates come from the first?  Fewer, right?  And then how many third dates come from the second."

<smiles>

"I haven't made it to the one night stand yet."

He got it.

#Ilooklikeanengineer

@BlueHairGoneBad has gone wild.  I whipped out my minion for this Twitter storm.

In other news, Django girls has free workshops this weekend for self-identified women who want to learn to code.  See https://djangogirls.org/seattle/ for details