Futuristic Pursuit 🐣

For the past 4 years, I've been telling myself that I will be ready for adult life when it comes - and until recently, that was true. I've always had a clear image of what I wanted to achieve in the future; Since college, I knew that I wanted to start my own (side?) project/company, and find a job in development somewhere that is chill. But now that I am finally about to step into proper "adult life", I cant help but feel like i'm not as ready as I thought 😬

The plan throughout uni was that i'd move back to London once my degree was over, find a job somewhere there as a software developer, and maybe start a company of my own (on the side). In fact, I was so confident in that plan until recently. Last year, during my time on placement at a company in Nottingham called ERT, a dear friend of mine (@rizbizkits) and I co-founded an initiative called ProjectFunction (find out about it here).

ProjectFUnction has been quite successful, however, I never expected it to gain so much traction in the Nottingham Tech community. This made me realize that I would need to stick around in Notts a bit longer after uni to see it through its untapped potential. After some mental back and forth, I accepted that my plans to go back home to London would have to be put on hold. So now, I find myself looking for a place to stay for next year (as I'm currently staying in a student-only accomondation).

I've been looking around Nottingham for a chill 2 bedroom flat - ideally one with parking, cat-friendly and on the ground floor. After all, Panther needs a place to stay too 😼

The places i've seen so far are quite afordable too, but then I realized, if I'm staying in Nottingham, I need to start looking for places in Notts 🤦🏽‍♂️. So I started looking...

In retrospect, I realize that moving away from home to university in Nottingham was nothing compared to the "adult life" im finding myself flying towards this year. In fact, I'm not even sure I am ready for it in all honesty. But here we are 🤷🏽‍♂️

In December, my friend Rizwana and I were discussing what kind of places I was looking for in terms of jobs, and after giving it some thought, considering my past experiences, it became clear that I had a rough idea of what I wanted 👇🏽

• A startup-like environment would be great (1 - 30 people)
• Being flexible enough to work from home
• Having personal-development budget and opportunities
• No crunch-time (clear seperation of work and personal life)
• Countless opportunities for career-progression
• Diverse and inclusive teams
• Experimental when it comes to implementing new ideas
• A place that is not afraid to make their own tools to aid development
• Open-souce contributors would be nice
• Friendly/community-like team
• A place that is happy to work and give back to the community
• Somewhere that uses cutting edge technology

All in all, I have a clear idea of the kind of workplace where I want to work as a Web developer 👨🏽‍💻. Now I just need to find it and make it happen. I guess i'll find out when it gets to it. I just hope that the place I find meets those points as closely as possible 🤞🏽. Once I do that, I can finally start focusing on ProjectFunction, and the many plans we have for it in the near future!