My First Blog Post

I decided to go with building my personal site and portfolio with gohugo.io. I discovered Hugo during my time on the Technology Leadership Program at Target Corporation. It’s very easy to setup, uses GoLang to render all of the pages. Right now I’m sticking with pre-designed theme for now since this will mostly be just for me. However, I do want to explore building my own layouts one day.

Starting at Target

For details, TLP is a program at Target Corporation is for newer/recent collegiate graduates to be introduced into tech world. My first rotation is on a team called Measurement, which ingests and partitions a lot of data for a lot of the company and makes it usable.

My experience so far has been amazing but overwhelming to say the least. It uses GoLang which I’ve never actually used before joining this team. It also uses things like Elasticsearch, which I still don’t fully understand after being on the team for two months.

I’ve learned pretty quickly that no one ever actually fully understands what’s going on, but knows enough to get by.

Nevertheless, I am learning a lot about the life of an engineer. There’s more research involved than I ever anticipated. I’d say so far it’s about 25% actually writing code, 30% doing research, and 45% having design and solution discussions. But that’s just after a few months in my first rotation. Maybe things will change in a few months.

Leaving Best Buy

I spent 8.5 years of my adult life at the same company. Granted 4 years was working in the stores and 4.5 years were at the corporate office/magic castle. But I learned A LOT about corporate life there. I had great mentors and truly felt like I was part of a family. I do miss them, it’s hard to leave a company after so many years. Not so much about the company itself, but the people that I worked along with for so long that I could truly call my friends. I can definitely see myself going back one day and I wouldn’t regret it. I do not regret my decision to leave Best Buy to start my engineering career, but I know I miss that culture extremely.