I had a dream job. I also had a dark secret. I was working as a college professor (awesome!), and working for myself (also awesome!), and living in a coastal California town where people often go for vacation, drawing pictures of birds! But, every month on the 20th my student loans and rent were due on the same day. I dreaded that day and I almost never had enough money for both. I was in a dark place, and I realized that I was not on my way to achieving any kind of long-term goal. (house, dog, international travel, any kind of disposible income) My bosses loved me and told me that they needed a retirement exit plan and I was part of it. BUT they are public employees so I could look up how much they made. My boss was at the peak of her career and REALLY like incredibly good at what she did and she was making $63k and had not gotten a raise in 8 years. That was a sobering moment for me and I knew then that college professorship was not in my future. I am a big fan of the idea that if your life is not going the way you want it to: change something. So I did just that and reached out to some companies in Colorado to talk to them about the industry. (cold outreach!) I had a miraculous 100% response rate and talked to some very nice people about being a developer, and what kinds of jobs are out there. Then I applied to Turing. And the rest is history.
***M1 *** I failed really early. I was doing the Date Night project and it was partially working at on Wednesday night, by 8:30 I had broken it and decided to bike home. I was pretty frustrated so I biked really fast and remembered that in college I would solve these problems by reducing them to just numbers. So I went home and re-built my project with numbers only and it worked. Since then I felt much better equipped to solve challenges.
***M2 *** I was just slinging code like a madwoman. It was great. I came to Turing almost every day.
***M3 *** I missed the day in mod 2 where someone was like "get ready, M3 is super hard", so I came in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for some fun. By week 3 my eyes were permanently bloodshot and I stopped scheduling any type of social interaction. BUT, my personal project was definitely a highlight and tapped into a recurring theme in my life: I am bad at following directions. I don't think I even looked at the spec for the personal project until the last week. Oops. But it went great and everyone was super cool.
***M4 *** After a very rocky first week, things started looking up. My eyes were still bloodshot, but I was feeling less stressed. (not for any reason, I was job searching as well) I'm still not quite sure how I feel about Mod 4, but I'll have time to reflect when I'm done with the job search.
- I'm moving to Augusta, Georgia: home of the masters, and NSA Georgia.
- Do one pull-up (like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2)
- GET A DOG
- continue to find ways to apply my new coding skills to visual challenges, D3? Processing? R?
- Rebuild my personal site in React
- probably keep drawing birds