I finally got all of the bug fixes and small tweaks for my website shipped. Most of the changes were to do with parts of the digital garden (graph, markdown processing, link capturing, etc.) as well as some redirects 'n' stuff.

On needing a desk for me and space for my ADHD, missing my friends, the true meaning of flexibility, and why not everyone wants to work from home all day, every day:
https://lkhwrites.medium.com/im-one-of-those-weirdos-who-actually-wants-to-go-back-to-my-office-bec3933c1a63

Graduated High School

It wasn't obvious that I would finish high school, let alone attend university. I was smart enough, but ADHD is a hell of a drug. It took me longer than your average bear to get focused in life. All told, I attended four different high schools:

1. Claude Watson School for the Arts, Earl Haig - expelled
2. The City School (alternative) - expelled
3. Contact High (alternative) - graduated
4. The Student School - graduated (again)

I took two victory laps, but eventually graduated with honours. As a parting gift for the last of the bunch, I built them a homepage.

The performing arts education I received at CWSA (through the elementary years as well as in high school) was formative, and informs my work, outlook, and life to this day. I'm deeply indebted to the teachers who struggled to educate an unruly student.

Almost everything that you know about “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” is probably wrong

After disappointment in my own performance at TripAdvisor, I reasoned the problem was that though I liked working with computers, I needed to believe more in the purpose of the work.

After a somewhat protracted search I ended up at charity: water

c:w was a weird org & perhaps not a fit for a lot of reasons, but ultimately I think it was the case that I simply could not push myself to maintain Java (again) day in and day out.

It was never fully explained to me why—it likely was partially a matter of performance but likely also something to do with end of the year budget crunch—but I was abruptly & without warning let go on Monday, December 30.

As I re-entered the job market, I steered towards a few possibilities:

• Infrastructure / Cloud SRE work (in these days more than know, I'd have been loathe to look for a DevOps job title) – it ultimately went this way.
• Frontend development
• Developer Evangelist work

After college, I went to work at TripAdvisor in Newton, MA as a "full-stack engineer" randomly assigned to an internal-facing tools team (dealing with i18n, content management, etc. essentially everything for product admin except review moderation & anti-spam)

I worked in a cubicle, I was assigned very specific well-and-narrowly speced work, and wrote a buncha jQuery.DataTables, Bootstrap CSS, and Java, endless Java. 

After 5 months of diminishing returns, I was PIPed.

Because I was on this internal tools team, we self-managed our app lifecycles (unlike most of TripAdvisor), as well as having a bunch of batch jobs that were cron scheduled and just sent emails (maybe) if they failed.

Pulled from core work, I was put on building out a scheduled jobs interface w/ better configuration & logging, and some deploy automation, using Jenkins. I found this work: 

• fiddling with shell scripts, 
• stringing together workflows, 
• shipping around artifacts
• learning & documenting & improving how things fit together 

much more to my liking, and as is rarely the case, I actually satisfied the terms of my Performance Improvement Plan and was put back in good standing.

But a month or so later, slipping again, I was offered a last chance or severance and chose severance.

During the following job search, I took on some freelance work and used the  freely available resources to learn Chef (which I had encountered but not dug into during the Jenkins work) and did first work in AWS