In 2022 I was out of work for seven months.

It was the hardest stretch of my career (and life); and yeah, I know other people have had longer, tougher chapters. But this was mine. This is my story.

The silence after job applications. The “we went in another direction” emails. The way days melt together when you don’t have a reason to open your laptop at 8:00 a.m.

The Journey to the Bottom

I picked up 12-hour shifts at a cocktail bar just to make rent. I walked so much on the job my toenails fell off. I’m 6'5", so on weekends they put me on the door. People spat in my face as I escorted them out; this was during peak Delta (Covid-19). I got threatened, but I needed a paycheck.

At 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday, I sat in my truck across from a homeless encampment the only place with open parking; and I broke down and cried like I never have before. “Is that my next stop?” I’d sold almost everything. I’d moved into an efficiency. It felt like the story was over.

It wasn’t. That was the bottom that taught me to count small wins; and keep going.

Somewhere in month two, I started keeping score, not of interviews or rejections, but of little wins.

I wrote them down every night. If I worked out, that was a win. If I finished a LinkedIn Learning class, win. If I reached out to two people I respected and asked a real question instead of “got any openings?”, win. If I just kept my head on straight and didn’t spiral, that counted too.

One of those wins became a turning point: I took DevOps and CI/CD courses from Nana. It was a lifeline; something concrete to push against. I learned the basics of pipelines, runners, artifacts, and promotion strategies. I shipped fake builds for fake services and watched green checks appear like tiny bursts of oxygen. I didn’t know it then, but those skills would end up in my daily toolkit. Today, I use that CI knowledge constantly.

Why the Small Stuff Matters

When you’re unemployed, the big scoreboard (title, salary, “What do you do?”) goes dark.

It’s easy to feel like progress isn’t real unless there’s a full-time offer attached. But that’s a trap. Momentum is built from inputs you control, not outcomes you can’t.

The little wins do three things:

• They shrink the game. “Get a job” is a boss-level quest. “Finish a 45-minute module” isn’t.
• They create a streak. Streaks make tomorrow easier. You don’t want to break them.
• They change identity. After a week of shipping tiny wins, you stop saying “I’m stuck” and start saying “I’m a person who moves forward.”

I wrote this in my journal the other night: sometimes it’s about that 1–0 win that means nothing in April. In baseball, 162 games is a marathon. That random Tuesday night shutout in April? It looks meaningless; until September, when you win the division by a single game.

Suddenly that small, sleepy April W was the difference between the couch and the playoffs.

Careers work the same way.

The day you choose the gym over doomscrolling.

The hour you spend learning how GitHub Actions caches dependencies.

The afternoon you use Allure TestOps to wire your manual test cases to a repo.

None of those days is the day.

But put enough of them together and you start showing up different. Interviews feel less like interrogations and more like conversations. You have receipts. You’ve built a body of small work.

What Counted As a Win For Me

I kept the bar embarrassingly low; and that’s the point.

• A workout. Not a marathon. Thirty sweaty minutes.
• A finished lesson. LinkedIn course, Nana’s DevOps, a future blog post on CI done means done.
• Two quality touch-points. A DM to someone I admire, a thoughtful comment on their post, or a short note saying what I learned from their talk.
• One artifact. A gist, a small demo repo, a diagram of a pipeline, or a write-up of a bug I’d solved before.
• A better choice. Going to bed on time. Cooking instead of ordering. All of that matters.

Here’s the crazy part: those “small” things compound. The course gives you language. The artifact gives you something to reference in interviews. The workout makes you less brittle. The better choice sharpens your self-respect. And self-respect is gasoline.

The DevOps Detour That Wasn’t

When I signed up for those CI/CD courses, it felt like a detour. I was a QA/QE leader; shouldn’t I be grinding LeetCode or cramming architecture questions? But it turned out to be the path. Learning pipelines reframed how I think about quality. It made me dangerous in the right ways:

• I can wire tests into the pipeline without waiting on someone else.
• I can read a failing workflow file like a map, not a mystery.
• I understand where flakiness comes from (data, timing, env drift) because I see where the bodies are buried.

That confidence shows. It showed in interviews. It shows in my work now.

If You’re Out of Work Right Now

This isn’t a pep talk from the mountaintop. It’s a field note from the middle.

1. Start a wins ledger today. End each day by writing down three things you did that moved you forward. If you can’t think of three, do one now (ten push-ups, one message, ten minutes of a course) and write it down.
2. Pick a 30-day skill sprint. Something that’s close enough to your lane to signal value but new enough to feel like growth: CI fundamentals, container basics, Playwright test triage, observability 101. Keep it scoped. Ship tiny artifacts along the way.
3. Become easy to help. Post what you’re learning. Ask specific questions. Share your half-built thing and ask for feedback on one part. People like helping people who help themselves.
4. Protect your streak. You don’t have to be perfect. You do have to be consistent. If life floors you today, fine. Tomorrow, pick up the pen and write down one win.

We’re Not In the Same Race

The worst part of job searching is the comparison spiral. You see someone announce a new role and your stomach drops. You’re not running their race. You don’t know their innings, their injuries, or the bullpen they had behind them. You only control your at-bats.

The April win is yours.

No one posts about it. No one “likes” it. But in September; when things break your way by one game; it turns out that quiet little W was worth everything.

If you need a place to start, borrow mine from August 9, 2022:

“Instead of watching TV, I connected my TCM to the repo. I finished the manual test cases! (Thank God) I have 3 chats on the calendar with people in my industry. Two months ago I felt like I was on an island by myself talking to a volleyball like Tom Hanks. Today, that’s four wins.”

That’s how momentum sounds. Not glamorous. Very real.

Keep Score. Keep Going.

I can’t promise the timing. I can promise the math: inputs compound. Skills stack. Streaks harden your spine. And when the phone finally rings, you won’t be auditioning for the person you used to be. You’ll be interviewing as the person you built; one small win at a time.

If you’re in that tough stretch right now, I’m rooting for your April wins.

Keep score. Keep going. September is closer than it looks.

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