Of course there’s a lot I could say about my current job, good and less so. I accepted the position out of college knowing that tech hiring was starting to become a wasteland. I don’t regret it. I had literally no experience, so my desperation was high I know it showed. All I wanted was to touch some code, not mine, someone else’s, no matter the cost. And I needed that dough, at least a little bit, which is about what I got.

I learned so much the first year working there that I would literally have a headache many times driving home.

There were even a lot of common (older?) tech programming things I use regularly that I literally never heard about in college, that maybe I should’ve? I went to a tiny college with an even tinier computer science department, so maybe that’s why.

Mini list:

• Cron jobs, a classic way of scheduling when scripts run and stuff should happen.
• Epoch Time, needing to convert them and just their general existence.
• PHP, I think someone said “PHP” once in a class about languages and everyone shivered.
• FTP, okay maybe this was mentioned but no one was listening.
• The Internet Archive! We use this so often to look at clients old sites for one reason or another.
• Dev tools, this one is surprising I know, but I don’t recall properly using it for anything more than just looking at console logs in college. Using dev tools for testing is paramount for anything web dev, and this was a minor learning curve for me when starting out.

There are also plenty of newer tools or software that my work should use that it does not. Currently I work in php 7.something, and bootstrap 4. I shed a tear praying for Bootstrap 5 literally every single time i’m working in the templates.

The actual code is exceptionally dated as well. The legacy code directory is daunting, but maybe that’s normal for any small software firm? But hey, at least the comments you find are funny.