2 Days Left

It's been a long time coming, but I'm finally reaching the end of my tenure in the golf business. I moved down here to Florida with my fiancé in 2015 to pursue a career in the golf industry. I never had any interest in working as a golf professional, but at the time, I thought it was the best thing I could do. I had worked at a lot of dead-end jobs and couldn't find any work that applied my major in Economics, and I knew I wanted to start some kind of career. I've played golf since I was 10 and have literally grown up on the golf course. I wasn't some spoiled rich kid or anything; in fact, my dad and I would go to the semi-private university course after he got done with teaching most days and work on our games. Golf taught me a lot about life, and I thought, since I know all about the game, it could be a good career for me. When we first moved here, I was able to get a job in a golf shop and start working my way up. Within a year, I got a job as an assistant golf professional at a decent course and made some more contacts. Less than a year after that, I landed a job at my current club, a very prestigious classic course in the area with a great reputation. The members have been great here, and I've made a lot of great memories; I've even enjoyed some of my time here. At the end of the day, though, I just didn't feel fulfilled in this career. I felt like my potential was being wasted, and I never really had to use my brain.

I've had an interest in coding for several years now, but only superficially. Everyone talks about how lucrative a field it is, and you hear about the bootcamps out there where you can train for 3 months and get hired into a near 6-figure job right out of the gate. But, I couldn't afford to take 3 or more months off of work, especially with a young daughter, not to mention the heavy price of admission. So, for quite some time, I resigned to the fact that it was an insurmountable barrier to entry. After working a crazy season last year and getting completely burnt out of the job, I gave it a second look. After quite some digging, I realized it was possible to learn how to code on my own, from online resources, and for very little money. I realized it was going to be a challenging road, but I was determined to get out of the golf industry. Within the first month, I was completely hooked and I was consuming as much information as I could get my hands on. I spent 4 to 6 hours every single night learning whatever I could about this new world I had discovered, and thought I would start applying to whatever job I saw. Back in July or August of last year, I actually landed an in-person interview with a local company and thought I was on my way to landing a job within 3 or 4 months of starting. Unfortunately, nothing became of this, and the search had to continue. For months, I kept working on my resumé, portfolio, and this blog, as well as over 500 hours of coursework to build up my skill set while applying to more and more jobs, but nothing happened. I had quite a few interviews, but my lack of experience was always the killer. Finally, in December, I was offered a job with a local company, but then turned it down, thinking I could find a better offer. With no better offer coming for the next 2 months, I came back to this company to see if they were still willing to hire me, and they were. So, here I stand, on the precipice of the end of one career and the beginning of something much bigger.

Today was another brutal day at my job on the golf course, being the first official round of the Member-Guest Invitational. We worked 12 hours yesterday and another 12 today, with a 14-hour day ahead of us tomorrow. After that, I have a "normal" 8-hour shift on Saturday, and then I'm done, but it's hard to even see past tomorrow at this point. Still, I had to at least get an hour's worth of work in before I passed out, tough as it might be. My eyes were blurry and my mind barely works, but I made it happen. I'm working on Andrew Mead's The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp on Udemy, specifically the section covering JavaScript in the browser. This has been a great section, covering a lot of ground and integrating everything we've gone over in the course to this point, including several higher order functions with the use of .querySelector, .addEventListener, and other methods from the browser. We are creating a simple todo app, but the way we are creating it is totally unique to any other todo apps I've done in the past. In fact, I don't know if I have created a todo app with vanilla JavaScript before, maybe only with React or Vue, so it's kind of cool to see how it's done in this way. I've used all of these methods and concepts before, and it all makes perfect sense, but it's really cool to see them all working together like this.