It's been a minute since I've posted here — October of last year, to be exact. Here's the honest version of the gap: my wife and I welcomed our second baby, and I spent a good chunk of the months after that heads-down in a job search. Between diapers and interview loops, blogging fell to the bottom of the list. That's just how it goes sometimes. Family and finding the next right opportunity took priority, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But I'm back today because the job search is over, and the news is worth writing about.
The Offer
I've accepted a position with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), brought on through the U.S. Tech Force Initiative. I start September 8th, with 30 days of telework before reporting on-site at OPM's Macon, GA, office on October 8th. That means my family is packing up our life on Florida's Space Coast and planting new roots in Georgia over the next several weeks.
If you'd told 2018-me — turning wrenches and pulling 70-hour weeks in the natural gas industry for $40k a year — that eight years later I'd be walking into a role with the federal government as a software developer, I'm not sure I would have believed you. But here we are.
The Long Way Around
I made the jump into tech at 30 years old, through a coding bootcamp at the University of Richmond, with zero computer science background and a lot to prove. I started at Homes.com, which was owned by Dominion Enterprises at the time — two years into that job, Homes.com was acquired by CoStar Group, and I rode that transition into a bigger company. From there, I spent the last several years at Global Payments building retail POS software used by over 22,000 merchants. Along the way, I ran a boutique freelance studio on the side, kept showing up to work, kept shipping, and kept betting on myself even when the path wasn't obvious.
That's the part I want other career-changers to hear: there wasn't a straight line here. There was a lot of "good enough, ship it," a lot of unglamorous consistency, and a willingness to keep applying, keep interviewing, and keep improving even when it would've been easier to stay comfortable.
It's a lot like disc golf, honestly — my other obsession. You don't get better by throwing one perfect round. You get better by playing consistently, tracking your rating, and grinding out slow, steady improvement over years, not weeks. Careers work the same way.
What's Next
Over the next month, you can expect this blog to pick back up — I'm planning to write about the transition into public-sector tech, what it's like building software at federal scale versus a Fortune 500, and probably a few posts about surviving a cross-state move with a toddler and a newborn in tow (pray for us).
If you're a bootcamp grad wondering if it's "too late" to make the leap, or if you're mid-career and stuck the way I was at Global Payments — it's not too late, and being stuck now doesn't mean staying stuck. Keep showing up. Keep sending the resume out. You don't always see which door is going to open.
More soon — from Macon.