Finally Here

If you've read through the last 9 entries, you'll have a pretty good idea of how I arrived at today. I started my journey off as a fairly new father with a dream to create a better life for my family. I was working as a golf professional, with a mediocre career ahead of me, and knew I could do better. My brain had been put on the shelf for my career at that point, and there wasn't much hope I would ever have to use it again. This was unacceptable to me, and I felt like I was destined to do more with my life than that. Coding had always been somewhat mystical to me, and I was always attracted to it, but I could never take the leap. Suddenly, I did, and I never looked back. Ever since May 26th of 2019, I haven't skipped a single day of studying, which to me, is quite a departure. I've never been this driven before in my life. I suspect I still have a long way to go, but I'm really enjoying the journey so far. That fact makes all of this so much easier; I love learning about this stuff and I always crave more. If I were trying to learn something I had very little interest in, I suspect I would be dragging my feet at times. I might be able to keep it up for a little while, but I wouldn't have near the amount of motivation and momentum that I have.

There are times, though, where I just don't want to put in the work that day. I know how imperative it is for me to put in the work every day, so I find a way, but there have been some tough days in there. Sometimes I get to a point with a topic of study where I just don't have any interest in pursuing it any further, or it's just not an interesting topic. There are things in software development that are really important to learn, like recursion, but aren't that fun to actually learn. Often, when I get into ruts like this, I have to take a step back from what I'm doing and maybe change directions a little bit. Up until recently, this has meant exploring another corner of web development, typically something in the JavaScript ecosystem. Even this was becoming stale to me, though. I felt like I knew the frontend pretty well, I knew React and React Native pretty well, and I really didn't have much interest in taking another course on them. I decided to work on some projects instead of working on courses for a little while. I created a cool little project cataloguing superheros using React and TypeScript, and implemented some really cool concepts in those worlds. After finishing this up, I took a look at this blog. I was starting to absolutely hate the look of the styling, so I decided to do something about it. I spent about a week going through the blog and changing the styles completely. If you never saw it before, I think it looks much better now than it did back then. If this is your first time seeing it, I hope you like it.

But, then I was back to wondering what I would do next. I started looking around for another mountain to climb. I thought I might be ready to take on a second programming language, but with so many options out there, I didn't know which way to go. Of course, there are tons of polls and blog articles out there ranking the top programming languages in one way or another. At the top of almost every list were Python and JavaScript. I thought, well, having both of those languages could really open up a lot of doors. At that point, I only had a general idea of the capabilities of Python; I knew you could use it do some backend development and some data science stuff, but that was about it. I took an introductory course by Andrei Neagoie and realized I was able to pick up the language pretty quickly. The amount of similarities to JavaScript were astounding to me, and whenever I came across something I didn't know, I was able to figure out the answers I needed from Google pretty quickly. Towards the end of this course, I was introduced to Data Science and Machine Learning. Immediately, I was captivated, just as I was by web development in the early days. All of a sudden, I was staying up much later than normal, pouring over the material, and I just couldn't get enough. This takes me up to present day. I'm on a course now that focuses solely on Data Science and Machine Learning, and I'm still in that mode. I've always been statistically inclined, and I really think this might be the direction I go in going forward. Who knows, things may change again, but for now, I'm going to see how far this takes me.

Until tomorrow!