My name is William Walker Smith. I was born to Gary and Diane Smith
in Austin, Texas on June 27th, 1995.
Shortly thereafter, my family
moved to the small (or at least it was small in 1995) town of Liberty
Hill.
There I spent my childhood running, biking, and exploring
the nature of the Hill Country. In 2014 I graduated
Liberty Hill High
School and moved to Golden, Colorado where I began studying at the Colorado
School of Mines.
It was truly a life changing and
mind opening experience, where I met life-long friends and began to learn
about
myself. After two semesters at Mines, I decided to transfer to a larger
University. I
felt like even though Mines was an amazing engineering school, I wanted a
more rounded education and
experience closer to my friends and family.
At this point, I had to consider my options,
and I had already applied to the University of
Arkansas
out of high school and had been accepted. Most of my dad's
family is from Arkansas, so I spent a large
amount of my childhood visiting
my grandparents. I had been to the University in Fayetteville multiple
times, and after a fair amount of consideration, I decided to transfer.
The change was much more difficult
than I had anticipated, and the first
couple of years at the U of A were some of the loneliest and most challenging
I had experienced in my short life. It was during this time that I
realized my current major, mechanical
engineering, was not actually
something I had much interest in. This discovery, along with the pure exhaustion
of tyring to become an engineer, led me to the decision to take a
semester off. I went to work as a waiter and
took a break from academics.
During this time I had a conversation with a good friend from Texas who
brought up software engineering. It was during this conversation that I
started to think about coding as a
career. No doubt, software is a
superbly difficult field, but the difference was that I actually enjoyed it.
Not just as a class, or a potential career, but just coding itself. I
love creating tools or games from the ground
up, and having total and
complete control of all of their aspects. I returned to the University
of Arkansas in
2018 and by December 2020 I had graduated with a degree in
computer science. This, of course, was smack
right in the middle of the
coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, I was able to find employement as a
Junior
Software Engineer at a small startup in Fayetteville known as
Field Agent. It served as an invaluable
experience, and I learned much
during my time there. Unfortunately in Augest of 2022, I, along with a
big
chunk of the dev team was laid off, due to the company's financial struggles.
Now I find myself at a crossroads once again.
Initially after being laid off, I looked for another
coding opportunity in
Northwest Arkansas, but after time has passed, and I've considered my options,
now feels like the moment for a change. There is a variety of reasons that a
move back to Austin makes
sense right now, and I'm ready to take the leap. So
look out ATX, I'm coming home.
I don't want to just code for the sake of a paycheck or health insurance. While I
do desire those things,
what I want the most is to be good at what I do. I know I
have skill when it comes to writing software. I've
proven it to myself, my professors,
and my previous empoyers. But I know that I have so much more to learn.
One of the
few frustrations I've experienced while working at Field Agent was, funnily enough, a
lack of criticism.
After completing an assignment, I would often hear "good job",
or "nice work", and that would be that.
That bothered me. I want to know why you
think I did a good job, or how I could have done it better. What
would you have done?
Are you really happy with my work, or is it just good enough? Because "good enough"
is not good enough for me. I'm not just interested in getting work done efficiently,
I want to get better at my job.
In retrospect, I should have expressed these feelings
at the time, and I intend to in the future if they return, but
we live and we learn.
So there you have it. I'm an intelligent, energetic dude with a passion for what I do
and
a burning desire to be better at it.