A career cross-section
Growth
Rings
Ten months between roles, read the way a dendrochronologist reads a core: 203 applications to 68 companies, 2 offers, and the 2,710-contribution build season that grew inside the same months.
Drought, fire, abundance, resilience. You can’t fake a tree ring.
How to read it: a ring only becomes readable once its year has closed. This one closed in March 2026, when I went back to Microsoft. Below is the weather it recorded, with the sample size beside every mark, and a section on what the wood can’t tell you. The drawing is stylised, not one ring per month.
The Weather Record
Two tracks ran through the same months. From May to October I only applied. On November 14 I made my first GitHub contribution, with Claude Code and a $1,000 API credit, and from then on the search and the build shared every week. January was the heaviest month on both: 35 applications and 559 commits. What the build became is on the front page.
The Marks
Half the companies I applied to sent nothing back: no rejection and no acknowledgement. Between them they received 62 of the 203 applications. OpenAI and Atlassian took five each.
Sample: 68 companies. Solid as a count. It says nothing about why.
The heaviest burns came from Microsoft (30 rejections), Anthropic (10) and Stripe (8). Most of the rest were a single email from a single application.
Sample: 85 rejections in the per-company log. See the tally gap below.
Microsoft took 50 applications, 30 rejections and 2 interviews, and the offer came through direct outreach rather than the application system. Samsara took one application, one interview and one offer. Volume neither made an offer nor ruled one out.
Sample: 2 offers. Read them as two stories, never as a rate.
10 of the 68 companies interviewed me, and 2 of those 10 made offers. Five of the ten were companies I applied to exactly once.
Sample: 10 interviews. Too few to rank channels, company tiers or referrals, so this page doesn’t try.
Limits of This Core
- Two tallies for applications. The monthly series sums to 165; the full log counts 203. I haven’t reconciled them.
- Two tallies for rejections. The headline of 76 rejection emails comes from the inbox; the per-company column below sums to 85. Same problem, same status.
- Too few outcomes to rank anything. Two offers and ten interviews can’t say which channel, company tier or referral worked. An earlier version of this page drew ten lessons from them. This one draws none.
- One tree. This is one person’s search, in one market, in one year. A core from one tree dates that tree.
- Public commits only, live. Git Width draws the public GitHub commits as rings, counted when you open it. It shows less than this page, which also counts private work.
The Wood
Every company, as logged. Sort any column or filter by outcome, or download the log as CSV.
| Company | Status | Applications | Rejections | Interviews | Referrals | Emails |
|---|