This Decade is Mine

Yesterday, I heard some news that took me down a notch. I applied to a job in Austin, Texas and made it all the way to the final 4 applicants out of 60, and then got turned down. I thought I had crushed the interview, but apparently someone had something I didn't have. Maybe it was that they were already located in Austin, or maybe they just had more experience than I did. Given that I haven't worked in the industry before and I'm making a big career change, landing this first job is proving to be difficult. Whatever it was, all I know is that I gave it my best try and did as good as I could. I have learned to deal with rejection like a champ, given that it's been in my face on nearly a daily basis for about 4 months now. I've never struggled as much as I am now to land a job, but nobody ever said it would be easy. I knew from the start trying to break into this industry would be a very difficult task, but I'm making progress. I've actually received an offer, and just getting to the point of being 1 of 4 out of a total of 60 applicants is still really good. This doesn't really lessen the blow, but I need to put this behind me and continue moving forward.

Today marks the beginning of a new decade, and as long as I continue doing what I'm doing right now, this decade is looking really good. It's difficult to speculate where I'll be at the end of this decade, but the possibilities are endless. I have demonstrated I have a strong work ethic and the ability to learn, so all I have to do is continue to put one foot in front of the other. It's not going to happen overnight; this will be a long process to get to where I'm going. In fact, if I continue on this trajectory, I'll have a brand new decade to conquer in the 2030's with even higher mountains to climb. I have a lot of time left to progress in this career, and there's so much room to grow. I think a lot of people think you just learn this stuff, land a job, and that's it; you don't have to study anymore and you don't have to grow your skills anymore. I'm treating this as a lifelong learning journey. I may be starting with JavaScript and the basics of web development, but there's no telling what I'll have learned in a decade, or even what there is to learn in a decade. Like I said, as long as I can continue to put in the work on a daily basis, I'll be set for life.

Today, I got back to work on the freelance project I've been working on for my aunt. I've really made some great progress in the last few days, basically setting up the entire site, at this point. I have everything in the correct position now, but things will be changing when I get the updated content from her. I've created this site off of the basis of her old site, with all of the content being slightly outdated. I suspect once I have it all set up, she'll have some new information and images for me to put in, but at that point, it will be as simple as plugging it in. The main thing I did today was implement all of the routes for the news articles. I haven't added the old content into them yet, but I may hold off on that until I have the new content. I think it would be nice to have it in place to give the site the entire structure, but it's not completely necessary, and I'm just going to end up deleting it anyways. As far as the front end stuff, my biggest hurdle at this point is implementing the slideshow on the homepage. I tried to get at this the other day, and I really struggled with it. I think I'm going to look at a few different component libraries to see if any of them already have something like this and just plug it in. I'm already using Semantic UI for a component library, but there's nothing wrong with just using one feature from another library, and that's not really going to weigh down the site since it's a pretty small site in the first place. I was at about 60% yesterday; I would say I got to about 75% today, with the hardest 25% left.

Until tomorrow!