After job searching for the past 2 months, there is one interview question that I’ve found very hard to answer and I’m going to share how I answer it. This question isn’t hard because it is a data structure, algorithm, or even a brain teaser type question. So not in the “I don’t know the answer sense”. It is hard because it is emotionally connected to who I am as a person and my cultural fit to an employer. It’s hard because it represents a huge clue of how I would effectively contribute to an employer in my free time. Also, it shows my ability to contribute and improve over time. That question is: What have you been doing in your time off? Before sharing how I answer it, here is what I have been doing.

I have a son who was born twelve and a half weeks premature. So that is the 27th week of 40 weeks. For the first year of his life, we spent our time in the hospital’s NICU and PICUs. We finally brought him home in September 2019. To me, that was a very long time to bring our son home. When we brought him home, we came with ventilators, feeding pumps, nurses and many more machines and supplies to keep him alive and safe. So when I completed my engineering contract right before Thanksgiving, I was ecstatic to spend so much time with him. I could finally play with him, read with him, hold him in the freedom of our home. So when December came around without work, I felt that was the best way to spend my time. I still feel that way. The amount I’ve learned and grown from him and the nurses has made me a different person. For instance, I communicate better and I’m more patient in stressful situations.

Then January rolled in and my fiancee started her maternity leave that she could never properly take while he was in the hospital. So I decided to continue without working and enjoy the whole family being at home together. It’s a privilege many families never get to experience. Nearly 22 months after learning we were going to have a baby we finally were able to spend a full day together in our home as a family. Most times in the presence of nurses, but still a nice experience. We were able to finally create more personal memories in our own space. So December and most of January was family time.

In January, job interviews with this question did not go much past this question. No matter how honest I was at the time. I was either a great or horrible fit for an employer. If they understand and value time spent with family, I look like a good dad. If they don’t, I’m a mediocre engineer without any technical passions.

The technical ideas were there and you can see in the above image of my commit history where I started developing again at the end of January and weekly in February. I started small with two coding projects, a Todoist clone and a social network, that enabled me to use newer technologies. I dived into newer React features such as Hooks and Context. I explored previously unused features in Firebase where I implemented serverless Functions, saved data in Firestore, and used its Authentication. Also, I was able to examine GraphQL which I wasn’t able to do in my previous jobs. I even pushed out a new update to my site in which I updated the design, added a blog, and imported old Medium posts. In short, February and March were full of fun uncommitted learning adventures.

April has been different. I’ve pulled all of my newly acquired knowledge and my experiences with my son together to create a project that is useful to me. The need for it came to me in December. I would forget his meds that weren’t given daily. I would start playing with him after starting a response to a recruiter and completely forget the message ever happened in the first place because the notification was gone. Also, I didn’t reach out to family and friends even though I had much more free time. I simply didn’t manage my incoming notifications or small tasks well. I needed to be nudged repeatedly either by Google Assistant or a real person. There were faults in that process.

People would forget to remind me and Google Assistant didn’t have the context I needed to return to the task effectively. So I started building Renotify. I could have built it much quicker with previously known knowledge, but I’ve enjoyed the challenge of implementing all the new learnings. I am going to continue developing it because I need and want a central notification management tool.

Originally when I first received the interview question. I stressed out about it. I thought if an employer does not value family time, small one-off projects, or investments in personal projects that don’t contribute to their tech stacks - I wasn’t of value to them. Now, I can give a quality answer that I’m happy to share regardless of how the response may be viewed.

I share that I’ve created a system that works to keep him alive while giving our family some source of comfort at the same time not hindering the nursing team. Also, I worked on my communication a lot. A LOT. I can also talk about the tradeoffs of newer technologies and how I would or would not implement them in their organization. Lastly, I could talk about how my previous experiences have come together in Renotify to make me a better developer because now I think more about architecture, technology tradeoffs, and engineering development speed. I am a better person after this gap in employment.