I’m Hired At General UI

On Friday I accepted an offer from General UI, a local dev shop based in the Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. Starting Monday I’m going to be their newest iOS developer, and starting on a streaming video project. To say I’m excited is an understatement.

But I want to step back for a moment. I started this software developer journey a few years ago, in early 2012. I started by taking a few online tutorials through CodeAcademy to learn some Javascript. I had the idea for Scorebook about a month later and dove into native iPhone apps. What I dove into was more than a few brick walls, but I dove in nonetheless. It was difficult; the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.

Thankfully, I’m not the hero of this story. I had the motivation and desire to press on through the hard times because the Lord has enabled me to get to this position. I wasn’t sure how I would provide for a family and he’s given me a way. I wasn’t sure how I could possibly learn everything that goes into building great apps, and he’s opened my mind to absorb what I have. He is faithful, through the hard times and the good.

Tomorrow begins a new journey. To be honest, I’m a bit nervous about it all. I have a fairly frequent battle with impostor syndrome and upon hearing some of the possible projects that I could be working on in my new venture, I started wondering if I’m up to it. The thing is, I know that I am. One thing that God has shown me over the last couple of years is that I can do this. I can’t do it without him, but he’s with me. So I can do this. I can learn, solve problems, build elegant code and good user experiences.

Something that has been running through my mind is that I want my next thing to involve working with other people. This is a great opportunity in that I’ll be on teams of 3-8 people and I can work on lots of different project. I’ll probably be working in Objective-C and Swift. iPhone and iPad. Several different clients, with several different developer. All of these are chances for me to learn from other people and it’s going to be great.

When I got the offer from the President, he closed the email with “Great things ahead…”. Bring it on. Let’s do this thing.