Life

Note: This is a crosspost from my coding blog, but I figured that my friends? mom? might be curious about how my program is going. If you are not interested in my progress this post will probably be very boring.

I’m having a hard time concentrating today, so I thought that I’d take a break to assess where I am in my program. Honestly, I can’t believe that it’s the end of March! As I mentioned earlier this month, I was hounded by this feeling of being “behind”, due to basically taking January off to earn some $$$. Totally reasonable, but I just couldn’t shake it.

March in Review 

Anyways, I busted ass in March, upping my study time to ~55 hrs/wk from ~40 hrs/wk in February. I finished 2 unit final projects that I’d been putting off forever, and scheduled my assessments for them. I’m going to meetups of some sort every week, so that’s getting easier.

I’m itching to contribute to “real world” projects, so around the middle of the month when I found an open source software internship program for minorities, I really wanted to apply. However, when push came to shove, I didn’t pull my application together fast enough for that round of selection. It was a long shot, as I found out about the program 5 days before the deadline. Besides putting together my app for the next round, I’m exploring other options to contribute. Code for America’s San Francisco chapter has a few interesting projects along with a weekly hack night, and Up for Grabs looks like a cool site for finding open source projects that need help.

New Computerrrrr!!!!

I’d been holding out on buying a new computer until the next Macbook Pro release, but there were no computers announced at the March Apple event. Bummer! But I took that as a sign to finally bite the bullet and get my first new computer since… 2009? It’s awesome. I’m a week in and so far I love developing on a Mac. I should have done this months ago!

Rails & the Rest…

Anyways, what else… I’m finally in the promised land…. RAILS.

First off…

Hallelujah!!!

Secondly….

It is kicking my ass. Rails is vast. Rails is powerful. Rails has so many amazing features, you just gotta know the magic words. As I’m plodding through, I feel like I’m being inducted into Hogwarts or something. WHAT IS THIS BLACK MAGIC RAILS???

The Finish Line

For a while in my program, there was a bit of a running joke about “never finishing” because it felt like every day they were adding more and more lessons to the final section. However it looks like they’ve finalized the curriculum! So now I know where the end is. Here’s how I stand today:::

  • Rails 53/102 lessons w/final project
  • JavaScript 46/55 lessons (close!!)
  • Rails and JavaScript 13/46 lessons w/final project
  • Angular JS 7/111 lessons w/final project

So close, yet SO FAR… I don’t think finishing off JavaScript/Rails stuff will be too troublesome, but I’m honestly nervous about Angular based on what I’ve heard from classmates.

Oh well, time to get back to work.

Life


Happy St Patrick’s day! Yay to all the wonderful stereotypical holiday trappings. Yay Guinness! Yay colcannon! Yay green!

It’s also me and Ryan’s 6 year anniversary, so a great excuse to post this cute picture from a friend’s wedding last winter.

Happy anniversary Ryan! I look forward to six more years of being unmarried and child free with you-LOL. 🙂

Life

Me, pretty much...
Me, pretty much…

So, it’s March. I’m feeling kind of strange, to be honest.

In November I had the excitement of quitting my job, starting my bootcamp and traveling to Japan. In December I went to New Orleans and celebrated the holidays. During January I freelanced, effectively buying myself more time to study and job hunt. I also spent a little of that money sprucing up my apartment.

February. Oh dear February. The great grey ghost of February. After working full time the month before, I felt “behind” in my bootcamp, whatever the hell that means for a mostly self-paced program. Behind the other people in my cohort, behind my targeted end date, and worst of all, behind in my knowledge.

I started the month determined to make up for lost time. Most of this was psychological, but numbers don’t lie: I studied more during the first week of February than I did the entire month of January. And this was with my mom visiting!  Quite a few days were wasted with review just to get back into the groove.

So last month I barreled right on through, putting myself on a stricter schedule, working day in and day out, glued to the chair, skipping lunch like a regular 9-5 job. I’m feeling okay about my progress, but looking into March and knowing that it’s probably going to be like this until the very end… I’m starting to feel a little nuts, honestly. The end is not in sight! When does it end???

All of the usual self-care suggestions are helping me to not go off the rails (insert ruby joke here): eat well, sleep enough, drink in moderation, see friends, exercise. However, what’s really holding me together is making more connections with the programming community.

  • I talk to the people in my program pretty much every day. They know the struggle. We rarely meet up, but every time we do it’s a positive boost.
  • I finally set up my programming focused blog, although I haven’t written much, and yeah I know I should.
  • As the third prong, I’m trying really hard to push myself to go to local meetups and study groups. This is San Francisco, so there is always something going on. Hitting up 1 or 2 meetups per week should be easily doable. Unfortunately I haven’t gone to enough events to start recognizing people, so it’s like starting all over again at each meetup, which makes me anxious. I’m trying to get buddies with similar interests to go with me, but sometimes I will have to go alone, and I will feel awkward as hell.

Anyways, there’s no great resolution to this post. All I can say is that if we’re friends, please reach out and try to schedule coffee/bowling/a drink/a movie/dear god something with me. I’m going a little crazy over here.

 

Life

Happy new year! Here we go again…

Normally when I reflect on the past year, I have so many feelings. This new year’s eve I wasn’t feeling particularly reflective, wistful or nostalgic. I wasn’t feeling much of anything, to be honest. 2015 was a pretty good year, but I don’t mind its passing. Still, I can easily point to the bright spots.

Relationships

Despite being majorly stressed out and heads down in my studies nearly all year, it was a good year for my relationships. I made new friends from the programming classes I took, rekindled old friendships, and deepened my existing relationships. I am really thankful for growth in this area in 2015.

Health

I gave up on wanting to do a chinup, but through the magic of running and strength training, I actually got kinda buff/thin in 2015, getting down to high school weight, which was a bit of a shock. Emotionally I was doing well, and had found a bit of stability and happiness in the pursuit of a goal. The Wellbutrin didn’t hurt either, not gonna lie. Oh, and I also finally got my wisdom teeth out. It was my first surgery!

Work

In the spring I pushed even harder to incorporate coding into my job, and that opened a few doors for me. Eventually I walked out one of those doors and on to another adventure (okay that was cheesey but I had to). I saved up enough money to quit my job and enroll in a coding bootcamp. Where that goes, well we’ll see. I’m trying to stay optimistic.

Travel

In 2015 I visited Burma, Austin, Shanghai, Tokyo, New Orleans, along with a few short trips in the Bay Area.  Embarrassingly, I did not make my resolution of seeing my family 4-5x in 2015. I did not see them at all. But you know what, my family can come and visit me too! I’m choosing not to feel guilty about that.

2016

So, what do you do for resolutions when you aren’t feeling inspired, guilty or fat?

  • I want to finish my program and get a job. That’s not so much a resolution as a necessity. IT WILL HAPPEN. IT HAS TO HAPPEN.
  • In order to find a job, I’ll need to network with the programming community here and make new connections. That said, what’s really important to me is to maintain and grow my close relationships (friends, family, partner). I’ve been really out of touch and engrossed in my own world. I can do better.
  • 2015 was the year of me being too busy to put any effort into my style. I knew that I needed to step up my game when coworkers started noticing whenever I dressed the tiniest bit nicer. Wardrobe makeover!
  • While we’re talking style… I’m sick of my apartment and everything in it. I’m a grown-up. I want my house to look like Pinterest, damn it! I know that I shouldn’t be spending money, but I’ve set a modest budget to upgrade and redecorate. I’ve started by reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering an Organizing”, getting new bath mats, buying a rice cooker that plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and researching how to paint furniture. Those are all Pinterest trends, right?

Okay, that was really long. 2016, let’s do this!

Travel

YOLO in NOLA

Last year in order to beat down existential dread, I got the bright idea of going on a birthday trip. Something to remind me how exciting life can be, and how being old is AWESOME. My birthday is around Thanksgiving, so the only cheap flights that I could find were to Canada. Anyways, I had a blast in Vancouver, so I thought that I ought to make this an annual thing.

This year I chose New Orleans, and bought the ticket oh… back in June? July? Ages ago. I was a bit out of sorts after returning from my Tokyo trip, but New Orleans was just what I needed. Great food, good music and friendly people. We stayed in a beautiful old house that a couple had converted into a home/AirBNB. From the moment I saw the ridiculous color scheme, I knew that we had to stay there.

Honestly, we were in and out with 2 full days in the city, and the entire time I was pretty much like :

emoji

There was just so much that I was excited about (voodoo, jazz, food, cemeteries, chicory coffee, swamps, cocktails…). Basically I was on a mission to soak up as much liquor and history as possible. This is a long and picture heavy post, so… just warning you.

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