I need to vent a little bit.

I've been out of work for close to two months now. I know that many people have been looking for a lot longer than me. But, I had a really good prospect at a company that I respect, and felt that I was a great fit for what they were looking for.

After a bunch of interviews, all of which seemed very positive, I got word this morning that they wouldn't be making an offer.

This was so incredibly disheartening. I even have a friend who just started working there who was talking me up to them.

This is now the third time I've gotten far in the interview process, only for them not to make an offer.

I'm just feeling so frustrated now. The last time I lost a job (four and a half years ago) I had an offer at another company is less than two weeks.

Now, it's been nearly two months. I've sent out over 80 applications, gotten interviews at five or six companies, with three of them getting pretty far. But I can't get to the offer.

Anybody who I've ever worked with would tell you that I'm smart, talented, a hard worker, and a fast learner. But, none of that seems to be enough right now.

I've got an initial interview at another company on Tuesday. So I'm going to keep plugging away at this. But right now, man, I feel really demotivated.

In a couple months my severance is going to run out, and I have to have a new job before then.

If anybody knows any jobs for a senior PHP or golang developer, please let me know. This can't go on much longer.

My company has just announced that there will be a round of layoffs soon. They just laid off a bunch of C-levels. They're giving us the opportunity to "opt in" to "workforce reduction" with a promise of three months severance.

It's been pretty tumultuous here, lately, to be honest, and I'm considering it.

But, I've got a wife and four kids to take care of, and I've never willingly left a job when I didn't have another one already lined up. And we've got good benefits (healthcare and dental) right now, so I really don't want to give that up.

Maybe if I had something lined up with similar pay and benefits, I could do it.

So, I'm looking for any recommendations. I'm a developer (of roughly twenty years), who has been doing a lot of for the past year, and I've gotten very proficient at that as well.

I'm looking for a US-based company, and a Principal/Staff/Senior Developer role.

Anybody have any good leads? My website is at https://danielrayjones.com, and I can be emailed at [email protected].

Dan Jones danielrayjones.com

I decided I wanted to learn a little while back. I really want to expand my skill set. I've been a developer for a really long time, and I really like PHP, but I need to branch out some more.

I had an idea for a project, and decided that this project would be the perfect way for me to learn go.

But, I'm finding it really hard to make any headway on the project because there's so much to learn to make it work well.

Meanwhile, I'm finding that I really want to make this project a success, and with the extremely slow pace of building it in go, I'm thinking that maybe I should give up on that right now and build it in PHP after all. I could probably have a working MVP in a few weeks if I did it in PHP. And then tackle a less ambitious project in go later.

I can't decide which way to go. Maybe I could even build it in PHP and later rebuild it in go.

I'm starting to learn Go. At work we're splitting out some parts of our architecture into a few microservices, and our Chief Architect decided we should write them in Go, instead of our usual PHP.

I've been enjoying learning it. It's been a long time since I've really tried to learn a completely new thing (as opposed to a new framework or whatever).

As a project to get myself into this, I've been thinking about building my own Fediverse server in go. Architecturally, I want it to be a lot like microblogpub, which I currently use. I actually want to be able to have a clear migration from one to the other.

Like microblogpub, my new project (which I'm tentatively calling gopub) will be a single user instance, intended to be easily hosted on your own computer, with a fairly simple sqlite database, and focused on broad ActivityPub and IndieWeb compatibility.

But I've got some ideas for a few features that I haven't seen elsewhere.

For example, I was thinking it might be cool to have alternate handles for a single user, to only follow certain things. E.g., if I'm [email protected], and somebody wants to follow me, but not see any boosts from others, instead of following [email protected], maybe they instead follow [email protected]. Or, if they only want to follow my posts that include a particular hashtag, they can follow [email protected].

Similarly, a single user with multiple handles would be nice. I think Friendica has this, but I'm considering including it in my project as well.

And one thing I really want to add is location check-in. Basically, the Fediverse equivalent of Foursquare. ActivityPub already has the vocabulary for this, but I haven't seen it implemented anywhere.

I'm still at the very, very early stages. Who knows if I'll ever get it in a usable state. And I'm working on it during my extremely limited free time. But I'm excited to start a new project.