Biggest achievement of the year 2018

My biggest achievement for this year is staying with my current company for as long as I have. This may sound daft, but bare with me…

A rocky journey

My journey as a web developer has been super rocky, my first job only lasted all of 3 weeks. I can now look back and laugh at just how short that was, but at the time it was soul destroying. Any sane person would have given up there and then, and tried another career, but not me. I went back to my old job as a cashier and I applied for more web development jobs.

After what seemed like hundreds of CVs for applying, I managed to land an apprentice role in Devon. Accepting this job meant leaving my then girlfriend (now wife) at home on her own. My mum wanted me to stay, but Tiff knew I had to do it in order to further my career. At the time there were no opportunities in Cornwall.

I headed to my friend’s house share and I worked as an apprentice for 6 months before my official apprentice would officially start. 5 and a bit months later, Tiff and I managed to find a house we could live in. Then a few weeks later, I lost my job, right before my apprentice officially started. Tiff was rightfully furious with me, making us do this huge move only for me to lose my job.

You’d think this would get easier

I then went on and worked as a cashier again for the same company as before, but in Devon rather than Cornwall. I carried on applying for positions and a few months later, I found another job, only to be let go due to them having funding issues.

This sucked, and my confidence was hit massively, but it still didn’t stop me. I applied for more jobs, left a few of them and then found another job which I enjoyed. Then a year and 6 months later, they let me go because of funds. It wasn’t hard to find another job after this, however my 3 month trial got extended by another 3 months and then they let me go due to me struggling with their workload.

Where is this going?

And now here I am, employed by a company called Lightfoot which is coming up to my second year of employment. It was a rocky start as I went from frontend development on a language called ReactJS (something I never used before, but they knew this) to my more comfortable languages PHP and MySQL. I’ve now been working with the backend lot for a year and it’s going strong.

I think it’s safe to say that I will be working here for another year at least. This means it will be the first company within my career that has lasted 3 years, and I am happy with where I am. Who knows, maybe I can progress up the chain even further with Lightfoot.