Pastures New

This week I’m in a bit of a daze. I’m approaching the end of a two week mini-sabbatical, and am preparing to venture into lands unknown for the first time in nearly nine years.

In 2009 I was fortunate to land a job straight out of university. Jobs were fairly scarce in the north-east of England around this time. It was the tail end of the global financial crisis, and work outside of London for graduates was scarce. I was one of the lucky few who managed to land straight on their feet. Other developers who I’d consider my equals (or even better than me) took many months to find work, though all did eventually. When I joined the NHS in 2009, I spent two years making friends and doing the work, but ultimately it was not work I wanted to do. Ad-hoc database front ends using ASP.NET weren’t my bag.

So in 2011, I took a leap of faith, and started looking for new graduate positions in Cambridge. I essentially rebooted my career, and took a position right at the bottom again.

The company that put their faith in me was ACTIV Financial, and August 2019 was the completion of my eighth year with the company. Ascending from graduate, to developer, and eventually to senior developer. I’ve been hugely blessed to have landed so firmly on my feet working with some of the best developers in the Fintech industry.

But this year I’ve been itching for a change of scenery and so from July, I’ll be making a shift again over to Amazon working as a software engineer in their new Robotics team in Cambridge! To say I’m excited is probably an understatement, but at the same time I’m also terrified. To quote Marge Simpson:

But hoist I have, and now it’s starting to feel really real.