Cool project. It's nice to see someone put together something awesome while so early in their education/career and have it work out for them. Shows you've got p

Cool project. It's nice to see someone put together something awesome while so early in their education/career and have it work out for them. Shows you've got potential. If I could give you any advice, I'd say think about going to academia. Working in the software industry is all about this kind of stress, and it really only gets worse from here. It's why we get paid lots of money to sit in a chair all day eating free snacks. If this project has been stressful, the industry is going to chew you up and spit you out. Projects follow the same trajectory: you work on a project in a bubble for a long period of time (maybe a year or two). Then, there's a usage spike the first day, the first week. Maybe it goes up (if you're lucky), but it probably goes down. You have to fight to get usage. And then things get harder. Bug reports. QA nitpicks about a million things you didn't notice. Product Developer's decide to change something major and you re-write 20% of your code base. Some of your junior team mates can't handle stress, so their output drops. The senior folks on the team get agitated and are suddenly unaccessible to help you with anything because they have their own shit to do. Oh, and btw now that it's already in the field with customers bitching about it, so everything needs to be done yesterday. You think about leaving sometimes, but you can't afford to be out of a job for a month, and thinking about studying for an interview yet again while working sounds even more stressful (since you haven't really used big-O notation or graph algorithms in your last 2.5 years as a web developer). Not every job is going to be stressful, but the really good ones will. You'll work with people smarter than you doing things a lot of people haven't done before.