Woo, what a year. This one has felt like it really went by quickly, however if I look back quite a few transitions took place so that would explain it. I am extremely excited right now going forward for what this year will hold, but first let's look at all that happened.
For the first half of the year, I attempted to quickly build up a streaming audience via Twitch while playing Path of Exile. I would like to think I did fairly well at that, however I waited way too long to try something like that because my YouTube had already been suffering hard enough. I eventually had to cave and get a job for the first time in 4 years.
The job was a blessing in disguise, because it gave me the permission to finally put a section of my life to rest that I had been subconsciously looking to retire from for quite a while. Sure I really enjoyed doing the gaming scene and YouTube and I now have some of my best memories from it, however it wasn't bringing me the challenge and fulfillment that I seek in life.
It wasn't until my sister moved down here for her CS major, that I had my passion for programming re sparked. At first I just wanted to brush up on some Java in order to help her out with her homework, but once I got into it I was fully hooked. Since then I've been reading up on some books for Java, and then Python. Once I began thinking about it I realized that this is what I actually want to do for a career.
After a while of messing around with random things and not knowing how best to approach becoming proficient enough for a job I stumbled across a post on Reddit about a boot camp that somebody attended for 3 months and then jumped into a job shortly after. I was excited as hell about this, because the slow pace of learning from a University always turned me off.
While I couldn't afford a Boot camp (even though I was accepted into one after some rigorous testing) I came across an amazing website called The Odin Project towards the end of November. It was essentially a full blown Boot camp curriculum, but with free self learning articles and projects to work through. This had my name written ALL over it.
So, about a month ago from today I began the project with the goals of completing it and being ready by June (which is when I would have completed the Boot camp I was looking at). My progress has been much more promising than I had realized. I am now already 93% complete with learning Rails, with only the final project remaining (which is pretty big, as I am squeezing in the learning of RSpec, Haml, and Foundation along with the other challenges that it will present)
So going forward, I definitely feel that I can be done with the entire Odin Project within another month without a doubt, so for the sake of additional satisfaction I'll probably be adding in some reading and advanced topics such as algorithms and perhaps a capstone project of my own (maybe learn to make a simple android app to go with the web app)
So, 6 months down the line maybe I'll be interning at or even working as a Jr. Dev at a company. Either way, I am excited to see where all of this hard work I am putting in takes me.
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