sacrifice or mutual gain

01 Jun 2020

So just a couple things to touch base on as I document this adventure.

First, I am excited to announce that I am almost done with my first run through all of the clojure koans! This is very exciting. I’ve also made some more improvements to my blog page, such as inserting a non-functioning email subscription input & button! Very exciting stuff. For now (and for looks) I think I’m going to just leave it there (it will actually get pushed with this blog post). I’ll leave it as a reminder to figure how to get that to actually work in the future.

The koans have been fun. I can see how & why clojure is considered to be such a powerful language. It just has abilities that make the readibility of the code a lot simpler if you understand the language. I believe it also makes it more difficult to royally mess up a program, but I’m still learning this.

I’ve also started reading Programming Clojure. I haven’t gotten very far, but I think this will be a good source for me going forward.

As for everything else, well, my boss actually got back to me pretty quickly, and he has agreed to lay me off!

At first, as you might infer from my last post, I was a little disappointed, but in our conversation, he told me that he really appreciated me coming forward to him early and my willingness to support the site. He also told me that he admired me for this action, which struck me with surprise (he’s not the type to admit admiration).

I suppose in a way, I’m sacrificing myself even if for mutual gain. My site will survive this better with me having communicated my plans to them, and I learned (I think) that my ‘sacrifice’ will potentially save not one, but possibly two employees from the chopping board!! This of course, in itself, made me once again question my sanity—my salary is enough to save 2 other employees at a time when there will be a huge oversupply of engineers, and I’m choosing to give it up and jump into this starving pool of plenty??!!

On the other hand, it feels pretty good to have made a non-related life choice that is now allowing me to save the jobs of potentially two other people. That’s pretty cool, and even with the little jab, I have no regrets about this choice I’ve made. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I’m excited, and actually, back to my previous point, I’m relieved that he didn’t ask me to stay on to do that one task I mentioned last week. It’s all I’ve been doing this week, and it takes up a lot of time when all the units are running. Plus, it gave me an idea for something I could maybe do “after” all of this. But more on that at another time.