Progressing a career is entirely dependent on:

• what you know,
• who you know,
• and how you utilise (in an ethical way!) , your knowledge/skill and your network/circles - this involves multi-directional communications, friendliness within community, truth/honesty and charity/relief

This week I will be exploring my business options and enhancing my skills in several technical and professional aspects, in order to help my fellow human and in order to continue to perfect myself.

As some of you may know, I have been looking for new career opportunities (for the past few weeks now), and not much has appeared yet, I have had some interest but nothing concrete so far. This is quite unfortunate really, my knowledge and my skill are ready and waiting to be snapped up by whoever wants to utilise them. So what is going wrong, perhaps it is the unfortunate state of the current economic playing field, perhaps I’m doing something wrong in my search for my next career steps, perhaps I’m not ethically utilising my knowledge/kill and my network/circles in the correct manner, perhaps I need to broaden my search space.

Please do send me a email, just to reaffirm our connection, and maybe we can explore potential avenues, or maybe we can just have a short conversation. My LinkedIn Profile has lots of detail about my skills, knowledge and experience, so please do have a look.

• My email address is: danieljohnlewis [at] gmail [dot] com
• My LinkedIn account is at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieljohnlewis (please do feel free to request a connection)
• My skype is: daniel.lewis

So since December 2011 I’ve been working as a Developer (PHP+MySQL+XHTML+jQuery + a whole load of other stuff!) for a Bristol-based company called Helastel. It has been my full-time employment since, and I’m finding it quite challenging but quite rewarding.

In the background I’ve kept my self-employment going - I’ve been writing some articles for a bit of pocket money, and have also been volunteering my services as a web developer/master to a certain political party, and some other groups.

But my personal and career development has far from reached its summit, there is still a long way to go, in fact, it is definitely a life-long journey. There is so much I want to learn, so much I want to experience, so much more skill to attain and wisdom to seek.

“Know Thyself” is a teaching which I try to get to understand. I want to know myself, I struggle with it at times. The question I ask myself is not “why am I here and what is my purpose?”, but “what are my strengths and how can it change other peoples lives?”

“Onward, Christian Pilgrims” is a different song, but quite similar to “Onward, Christian Soldiers” which I believe is called St Gertrude. The term “Pilgrim” speaks to me a lot louder and clearer than the word “Soldier”, and in general I prefer the “Onward, Christian Pilgrims” hymn. I am a “seeker” - I seek the wisdom that can be found in humanity and in nature, I believe that it can guide us in life. This seeking is a pilgrimage.

On a pilgrimage we take a good direction and sometimes take a wrong direction, it all depends on our orientation skills at the time. I’ve made some good career and life decisions, but I’ve also made some bad ones. We learn from the bad ones in order to not make them again, and we rejoice in the good decisions. The road is tough, and long - but the goal drives us, and we can rejoice in that goal.

These aren’t things which are Christian specific - in fact, these are things which are applicable to everyone - including atheists, agnostics and people of all faiths and cultures. Life is interconnected and intermingled - careers/business, education, lifestyle choices, lifestyle non-choices, cultures, government, religion/spirituality/belief/disbelief. Everything influences our decisions.

Some interesting thoughts for a Wednesday morning. I would be interested to see any comments people may have on this subject.

Daniel

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been using a programming language (Python) that I’ve not used extensively in the past to work on a unit of a production website, increasing the simplicity of the unit and hopefully also increasing the efficiency (Occam’s Razor stylie?). I have been learning “as I go along”, and with a little help from a borrowed book[1]. It has been fun, and I’ve found myself liking Python a lot more than I was expecting (as I documented in my previous blog post about My Python Learning Curve).

Within the past week I’ve also picked up a small project (almost finished), which was essentially “Web Design“. Those of you who know me, probably know that I’m not really a “designer” but a “developer”. So this has been a bit of a learning curve for me too, actual practical - production level use of CSS (both 2.1 and 3 - focusing on getting it working for Chrome, Webkit, Firefox and IE >= 8), and also some graphical work using the GIMP.

Being freelance means that I’ve been able to focus on learning new things, and doing it quickly - its something that I love. I may, or may not, use the new Python and Design skills in the future - but hopefully it helps me to become a more well-rounded freelancer. Variety is also a spice, and so it has been nice to step away from the PHP/MySQL and Semantic Web stuff that I’ve been doing for quite a while.

The next step is progression. Next week is the beginning of a new tax-year here in the United Kingdom, and I hope that I will be able to progress using some variety (as indicated above), some reuse of my existing skill set, some hard work, some networking and a bit of luck!

Where am I going (i.e. where am I progressing to)? Who knows where the path may take us? but travel it nonetheless in good faith taking decisions when needed.

I have figured out that at any one time I have:

• A favoured set of skills (skills that I already have, some of which might be rusty)
• A set of skills that I’ve recently been using or learning (skills that I have and are refreshed in my mind)
• A set of skills that I want to acquire
• A set of interests which I wish to apply my skills to

So I look for freelance work that will combine as many of the above as possible (so if you can help then please let me know!).

As I am becoming a Journeyman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, I shall be “paired up” with a mentor (someone who has many many more years in industry than I - although I do have quite a few already to be honest). This mentor will hopefully help to guide me on my career path, hopefully help me to avoid pitfalls that I have made in the past and choose good choices to make. I always hope that I can get more involved with the British Computer Society, but haven’t yet found their events particularly interesting (and when they do seem interesting, then they are usually somewhere else at some strange time).

So, time to plan combining skills and interests for the new tax year then!

Footnotes:

1. Learning Python by Mark Lutz