an alright start

Oh 2016. I am doing my best to get the most out of you.

You know how everyone starts out the new year with these amazing, life-altering resolutions that they're going to stick by and make their lives better? Yeah. I don't normally do those. Normally. This year is different. It's one of those situations where you know it's bad, and you're not totally happy, but you stick with it until you just. can't. take. it. anymore. Then you suddenly realize that if you start now, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Here are some numbers for you: I am 31, a single mom of 3 girls, working 40 hours a week at a job that is 70 miles away and I spend 15 hours a week driving to, taking 2 college classes, which means, unfortunately, having almost 0 free time. What do I do in my "free time"? Right now, it's learning to code.

In spring of 2015 I was finally a point in my life where I knew I had to start doing something to make my life better. I began looking at coding bootcamps, certain that I'd sacrifice and make damn sure that no matter what I found a way to make it happen. I was determined. On my way to work that afternoon, I totaled my car when another vehicle pulled out in front of me. The driver is apparently a fugitive, I hope I never find that dude, that's for sure. Anyway, it didn't stop me from coding, but it definitely put a damper on my productivity temporarily.

Fortunately getting a new car went fairly smoothly, and I was able for the first time in my life to buy a car without a co-signer. Feels pretty, pretty, pretty good. Once I got back into coding, I came across a LifeHacker post about Free Code Camp. [By the way, Quincy Larson, you are an amazing person] I immediately joined and powered through all of the HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap tutorials in two days. Fortunately I had taken an HTML class in High School and spent PLENTY of time customizing websites on GeoCities, and oh gosh, remember MySpace? Yep. Then I got to jQuery, which is wildly entertaining. Next up was JavaScript. Around the same time that I got into JavaScript tutorials, I enrolled in an Interactive Programming in Python course offered by Rice University on Coursera. This all hit right around the end of summer, when work was insanely busy and I wanted to relish that last little bit of summer. I chose to step back from coding and enjoy the last few warm days.

Suddenly, it was November. I had been debating for a while as to whether or not I should enroll in an actual college. Fortunately there's a decent community college right around the corner from my house that offers guaranteed admission into a state school if you do well. I enrolled. Code was put on the back burner through fall and winter, and then winter into spring.

I've been counting down my last few weeks of classes until my homework ends and my coding begins again. I'm about 70% through my JavaScript tutorials on Free Code Camp, and I'm determined to have those completed before the end of May. After those have been finished, my next assignment is tackling Ruby. I've got May through August to squeeze in as much code as humanly possible before I start my next round of fall classes. Let's hope that I remember to eat. I mentioned that I was determined, right?

Whew.

Sometimes I talk a lot, and I can be all over the place. A little scatterbrained, perhaps. I might proof these blog posts, I might not. Don't judge. Or do.

Sidebar:
A few days ago, I listened to the Code Newbie podcast with Quincy, where he said "Education wants to be free." If I haven't already mentioned it, I think what Quincy has started with Free Code Camp is absolutely amazing. If you're a self-motivated individual, I cannot recommend FCC enough. And you are thinking about a career change into programming or have recently started coding and have NOT yet discovered Code Newbie I would strongly recommend giving it a listen! The things that I was hearing from the guests reassured me that how I am feeling is the same way that others felt when they were getting started.