Tomorrow, I will - finally - take on my new, ninja-style identity as a company director. We're making a web service for university students - it's not built yet, but I think it's going to be pretty good :)
And a little after that, I'll start freelancing too. (zoe.f.rose@gmail.com, if you were wondering ;) ) The future's bright, and I couldn't be happier.
But had you asked me four years ago, there is no way I would ever - EVER - have imagined myself being in this position.
Back in 2008, I didn't even know I liked computers.
I didn't know any code. I didn't know anything about the machines I used all day. I had an Arts degree, I was trained as an English teacher - therefore I Could Not Understand Technical Stuff.
That's right, isn't it? That humanities people can't understand technology? We can't, right?
Right.
I applied for a job in publishing because I thought it meant I would get to read books.
Getting that particular job in publishing (at ProQuest, not CUP) did not mean reading books. It did not mean that at all. It meant struggling through huge text files filled with obscure bibliographic metadata for academic journals, encoded in a hugely unwieldy old format called MARC, trying to coax them into a standards-compliant form.
It also meant re-wiring my brain to cope with the concept that '?' did not necessarily mean 'question mark', it might mean 'zero or one of the preceding character', even when the preceding character is '.', which actually means 'any character', or '\(\<[a-z]*\>\)' or something horrific like that.
This did not come easy.
But, slowly, I cottoned on. That was the start of it. From there, at work and at home, the machines started to crack open for me - and they kept cracking. The next stop was databases, taxonomies, intranet search. Then sideways, into wireframing and functional specs. Lots of things suddenly became Interesting. Character encoding. Standards. Elearning standards. Open data. Open access journals. SEO. Accessible web design. Data visualisation. Versioning. Natural language processing. FOAF. Wordpress. The fact that 'petaflop' is an actual word. All so very interesting!
And with it all, the bizarre realisation that the things I'd loved to do best all my life, the parts of human experience where we help other people to use things to do things, had names - and other people loved them too.
Interaction design. Information architecture. User experience.
These four years have changed my understanding of what I should do with my working life completely. But they could easily not have happened.
The fact that they did happen is, I think, largely due to one person. One person who knew I had no relevant skills for that first publishing job, and still hired me. Who saw the ragged hole in the middle of my CV, with only the words 'family reasons' to fill it, and still hired me. Who, in all honesty, probably shouldn't have hired me - and still hired me.
High five, Stuart Beach. Bet you didn't realise, but you changed my life.
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This will be the last post on memexer.blogspot.com. We will reopen for business in a shiny new wordpress-y home shortly, along with new sister blogs - one of study skills for university students, and one for tech tips for academics.
See you then!
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