On Wednesday I wrote nine hundred characters about not hearing back from anyone. By Thursday two more people had put my name in front of somebody. One sent my profiles straight to headhunters.
Here is the part that is uncomfortable to say out loud.
Fourteen months of building did not do that. The Microsoft Store listing did not do it. Seventy one stars, 2000 downloads, none of it did it. What did it was admitting in plain words that I had been waiting a month and nothing came.
That is a strange thing to find out about yourself at 22. I spent fourteen months believing that if the work is good enough it walks into the room by itself. It does not. Somebody has to carry it in, and nobody carries something they were never told about.
Other half is just as true. That post only worked because there were fourteen months behind it. Nobody spends their own reputation on a stranger who has nothing to show. The work did not get me the referral. Without the work the referral would not have been worth making.
Both things are true and I had only ever believed the first one.
Scarred
My partner sat down to play my game this week. She stopped at the tutorial.
She sent me four things that were broken, the "next" button did nothing. Same line repeated three times. A tab that was supposed to light up stayed dark. Then it skipped four steps at once.
Four reports, three of them the same cause. The panel rebuilt itself every time a day passed in the game, which at normal speed is every one and a half seconds. The button under her cursor was being destroyed and recreated between the press and the release.
She was not doing anything unusual. She was reading, which made her slower than every test I have ever run on it.
Monday I promised I would sweep the fourteen month old app for unreachable code and publish the number today. I did not get to it. The week went somewhere I had not planned for. It moves to Monday and I will publish it then, whatever it is.
To the people who spent their own evening on me this week: I still do not know how to repay that, and I am not going to pretend I do.
If you have ever passed a stranger's CV along, what made you do it that day? I want to know, because I still do not understand it.