A Year of Change

Today is New Year's Eve, the last day of an odd decade, for me personally and the world as a whole. I've worked several jobs and lived in 3 different states, but it wasn't until this year that I figured out what I wanted to do with my future. For a while, I thought it would definitely be as a golf professional, but I wasn't happy with my career and didn't feel fulfilled in a lot of ways. I've thought about getting into coding for years, but had such a hard time taking the first step. Whenever I looked into it, the obvious path seemed to be a bootcamp, which would be way out of my price range. So, I would look into it for a few days, and then end up giving it up and going back to the daily grind. Finally, in May of this year, I went deeper with my research and found out there were other ways to learn this stuff. Maybe these resources have only recently gotten better, or maybe I just missed it when I was looking into it earlier, but I realized there were plenty of ways to learn to code for next to nothing. Since I started this journey, I've spent less than $300 learning a ridiculous amount, as much as I would have at a bootcamp or more. This might not be the path for everybody, but I have enough self-motivation to make it happen. While I have received an offer for a job, I turned it down. Still, I've made so much progress in the span of 7 months, I sometimes can't believe it.

About a month ago, I applied for a job in Austin, Texas, and got an initial interview pretty quickly. It went really well, and I was given a take-home test to complete in hopes of landing the next interview. After completing it, I didn't hear anything back for a couple of weeks and lost hope. Out of the blue, I received a call back and set up an interview with them. I had that interview last Monday, and thought it went really well. I was able to express my personality and got along really well with the guys who interviewed me. They let me know there were 4 applicants left out of an initial 60, and thought my chances of landing the job were pretty high considering how I felt about the interview. To my surprise, I received an email today letting me know they were pursuing other candidates. I've gotten plenty of rejections over the last few months, and I've gotten used to them, but this one hurt a little more than the others. If I had thought I had bombed the interview, it would have been pretty easy to take, but I thought I knocked it out of the park. I'm trying to move on quickly from this, but it's definitely knocked me down a peg. That's the nature of trying to land a job in this industry, though.

After working my 9-5, I got home and got to work on my aunt's website. I started this project about 3 days ago, and have made a ton of progress since then. I was able to set up the latest news page and got it looking a lot better than it did before. This is a sort of blog page, but the articles were all over the place. There was a grid system set up, but it just looked really scattered and overwhelming, in my opinion. I set it up so 2 articles appear on every row on a computer screen and only one on a mobile screen. It looks really clean now, and I just have to set up the links, add the correct photos, and change the content to reflect their newest articles when I get that information. I moved on to the portfolio page, which is the most interesting of all the pages on this site. In her live site, they have it set up as a really basic grid, with 3 columns on each row, everything looking really uniformed. I set it up so the top row is just one big element, and then it goes to 2 different sized elements per row, with the larger element alternating between the first and second position. In the middle, I have a row of equally-sized elements with 3 elements on the row. I think I used asymmetry in a symmetrical way really well, adding a lot of intrigue to the page that just wasn't there before. I also formatted the elements to appear more like a card in the Bootstrap type of way, giving them some separation. I now have everything set up on the page, but have some issues and some features to add. I said yesterday I was at about 30% completion on the project; I would say I'm now at about 60%. Of course, we all know the last 10% takes 90% of the time, so I know I'm in for a treat when I get near the end.

Until tomorrow!