2015 was a big year of growth. Feeling stuck in my career led me to branch out into new experiences, like solo networking, hackathons, and Startup Weekends. In the fall, my hackathon team of three took home a $30,000 prize for our solution to the traffic violation woes of the St. Louis area. At the time, I felt like this was going to be a pivotal professional milestone. Also around that time, my husband and I were considering a move out of the St. Louis area. By the end of the year, we had moved to Colorado (ultimately the best life decision ever).
That meant a brief transition period through my then employer who didn’t support remote work in my functional area as a long-term solution. For around five months, I was one of the only remote employees in IT at a Fortune 500 company. (I don’t recommend this).
Living in Colorado Springs meant lower salaries with few companies of interest to potentially work for. There wasn’t a whole lot of Agile and Scrum software development in that area in 2016. Alternatively, I could have commuted to Denver on a daily basis, which would have meant anywhere from three to five hours of daily interstate driving. No thanks.
In May of 2016, I entered the world of remote working, before it was ubiquitous.
I’ve written about the lessons and opinions I’ve gathered along the way here with an updated-for-2023 version of my operating manual and most complete body of thoughts here, and previously unpublished writings here.
Photo by Laurent Peignault on Unsplash
