January to March

This is a blog post about what I am up to, and what I’ve been doing since January and will do until the end of March. For some context:

Late 2016

In the last few months I quitted my job for three reasons:

1. I wanted to finally finish my Masters Degree Thesis
2. I wanted to get back into web development instead of what I was doing at the time
3. I was dissatisfied with my overall professional situation

In late 2015 I had almost everything done needed to earn a Masters Degree except for the Thesis. At the time a seemly great job opportunity came along. Personally, I found this to be a perfect opportunity to develop myself in my chosen professional field, move to Lisbon (I had only worked “physically” at Évora at this point), and earn some money. For those reasons, and other necessities, I set my thesis aside and pursued a new job.

Fast forward to late 2016. I started becoming dissatisfied with my professional situation which prompted me to look for alternative paths to take. Naturally, I decided that I should finally complete my Degree and work on a Thesis. I contacted Professors at the University of Évora (where I study), and a theme was proposed. Still in late 2016 I started working on that theme during my free time.

January to April

With this project, I resigned my job where I still worked until the end of December and imposed a deadline of no later then April 2017 to finish the thesis. I imposed this deadline on myself mostly for financial reasons as this thesis has no grant.

The period from January to March was necessary to complete the thesis’ project, but also to learn a few new technologies to get back into Web Development.

I’ll write two dedicated posts about the thesis and about web development, but basically, the thesis is a project about Data Mining done to the University of Évora’s Moodle data. If falls under the Educational Data Mining, or EDM, field.

To get back into web development I intent on exploring Node.js, libraries and packages used in Node.js, and also explore the newer trends in design, architecture, workflow, etc, among other things.

HackerX and New Job

Still in late December I had already resigned my job and started my new thesis. I intended on starting to look for another job only at the end of March.

But I received an invitation for the HackerX event. I will write a dedicated post about that, but basically, I attended one such event and schedule interviews with two companies. At the beginning of January I ended up getting a new job as a result of this event. The new job only starts on April 3.

Right Now

First of all, I am extremely grateful for having gotten a job on the beginning of January that only starts on April because this gives me time and space to focus on my thesis and other projects without the stress of looking for work when March comes. It also gives me an extra incentive not to slack and finish things on time.

It’s February 10th as of the time of writing, and I have indeed been following what I set out to do on this period. I intent on writing more blog posts about the thesis and other personal projects that I have made.