New Job

It has been one month since I started my current job. Many folks have been curious as to why after freelancing for such a short period of time I decided to go back to a full time position. I have to say, it was not at all my plans, but there were several factors that led me to this position.

I realized several things about myself in the last year or so and the most important one is that I am a CSS freak. I love CSS, figuring out how to make it more compact, more reusable, more better to be honest. It is what I read about the most in my free time and I’ve spent a lot of my own money on workshops and books on the subject. But as a freelancer, what is in demand, is a much more generalized set of skills. And as I continued to market myself, what I was really finding was that people wanted a JavaScript guru, the markup and CSS are side lines that are easy and everyone should just know how to do. But I definitely think CSS is harder to do well than most people think it is. I’ve been in the situation where the CSS was not well thought out and you walk into a 13,000 line stylesheet - that’s ridiculous, but it takes a lot of forethought before you even write your first line of code to avoid it.

So if CSS was what I really wanted to do, selling myself and my skills became very difficult. I had ideas and had several friends help me out with ideas, but it just wasn’t going very well for me and I was a bit frustrated.

Then along came an email from my current company and when I read their job description, I knew I had to apply. It was the first time where knowing OOCSS concepts was listed as a desired qualification, as well as experience with responsive techniques. Wait a second, you mean CSS was important to them? As I went through the interview process and talked more with the various folks, I realized that CSS was important and my knowledge of it would be pushed and pulled if they offered a job and I decided to work with them.

After 1 month I can honestly say that so far, I have not been disappointed. I have my first project done and I have learned a ton more about interesting patterns and objects they are using in their projects. I have started working on a project that has been going on for several months and I haven’t had to write a lot of CSS because it was written so well to begin with and the patterns and objects are already set up so well as to be extremely reusable. This is why I took the job - to be in an environment that cares this much about CSS and it is why I am so excited to continue working there on various projects. I am actually building things on a regular basis and each new project is a chance to learn and hopefully to learn a better way to do things than I did last time.