Painful Lesson

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview at a place that really excited me. The software they were creating (software for managing various systems), the technologies they were using (.NET, WebAPI, PWA, etc.), the methodology (CI/CD using AppVeyor, Octopus, git) and the learning environment were all just what I was looking for.
The interview went pretty well, but the way I prepared for it was totally different than what I was expecting. The answers to the interviewers' questions, even as they were coming out of my mouth, were not my best work. I was trying too hard. This is the first job I was really excited about in a long time. I thought it would be a great fit, but I was sabotaging myself at every turn, it seemed, because I was trying so hard to do and say the right things.
This interview process made me stop and reflect on what I really do know - those technologies and methodologies that I could explain to someone not in the software space. It's what prompted the REST article, and will most likely be the source of many articles because I think I blew this one.
I enjoy learning new things, but sometimes I learn just enough to get the thing that I'm working on done. Due to the Internet and Stack Overflow, it makes these sorts of things easy to resolve. I'm of the persuasion that that simple cycle is a cause for my short term memory: if it's easy to find the answer, there's no reason to remember it long term. But I learn best by doing - I suspect a lot of us do.
One of the lessons learned in this situation is to not trust the tools so much. When you submit your code to GitHub, make sure to clone that repository in a completely different folder and make sure that everything works as expected. One of the ways I was doing that was that I created this .NET Core app on my Windows machine and then pushed it up to GitHub. I then pulled it down from GitHub on my Mac. The "Fix" on the Mac required me to add a reference to a DLL. However, this did not actually fix the project per se, just the local instance of said project/solution. The reference was added as a local path rather than a NuGet package. In the future, I will make doubly sure that the code is building (more than just once per machine) from the code that exists only in the GitHub repository.

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