100 Days of Code: Day 1 (again…)
Yep, you read that correctly. I’m starting over again with the #100daysofcode challenge. I just can’t seem to keep up with things. And this time the excuses are still excuses but have changed my life a little in the past few weeks.
I ended up getting sick and having an extended cold due to our bi-polar weather here in Virginia. It’s 80 one day, 52 the next day, 40 the next day, followed by several days of 75, 80, 64, and 50. I’ve basically have worn my Sherpa hoodie or my Magfest hoodie everywhere I go because I have no idea how the weather is going to be throughout the day. It’s not untrue when they say you can’t experience all four seasons in one day, cause Virginia accepts your challenge and asks you to hold its beer and watch. So the first excuse is constant sickness.
Next excuse: I lost my job. I worked at a non-profit for 16 months and they let me go on February 28th. In the 16 months I was there, I learned a new CMS called Terminal 4 (and also learned the hatred everyone has for that particular CMS), learned a shit-ton about accessibility and Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 A, AA, AAA site compliance, and made a few friends along the way. As I went through my work, I realized I only had 4 sites I was able to launch in those 16 months. The majority of the work was tied up in the red tape circle-jerk, so I usually had long stretches where I didn’t have a lot to work on web-wise. So I used our Lynda.com account to learn a few things and added a ton of certificates to my LinkedIn account to make it look like I’m doing more than sitting around making my chair spin. Which is awesome when you do get to just sit and spin in an office chair, but not for several days at a time.
So yeah, I lost my job. And I’ve attempted to find a new one for almost a year and have had no success. I have no idea why I haven’t had any success in finding new employment. It could be many of the jobs I apply to end up not listing all of the requirements for the people they’re looking for, or they’re looking for a front-end developer that can also be their UI/UX Dev and their Graphic Designer and their Social Media expert (don’t know the new term for this one and I don’t particularly feel like looking it up at the moment). Or they’re looking for a unicorn that is also a master of all trades so they can hit the ground running without needing to train. Who knows…but yeah…I’m unemployed again…so that’s the second excuse.
The third excuse…I don’t know if I really have a third excuse. Laziness? Stress? Emotional torment? I don’t know. I just haven’t felt like coding. It’s something I need to work through, but I can’t seem to do so. I’m getting more sleep now that I have a C-PAP machine. Just need to figure out how to not sleep so rough so the mask slides off. Lolz. And a good friend is letting me borrow one of his cars so I can have transportation until my car can get fixed and inspected again since it failed it’s state inspection. And I was able to find a job in a local video game store that I can work at on Saturdays, so that’s some money in my pocket. But even with all that going on, I just haven’t wanted to code. I think my confidence has just fallen to severely low levels at the moment. So yeah, excuse three is probably me lacking confidence in my code combined with not wanting to code.
So I talked to a few friends and they helped me out a lot. I have an idea of the best time of the day for me to work on certain things and when I should take a break for myself. I’m also cleaning out my office so I can have that as a usable space instead of a place to pile all of my junk that I’m not using at the moment. And since it’s been so long since I’ve coded, I decided to start over a third time with the 100 days of code challenge and see if I can get farther along this time. I made it to day 71 before things fell apart, maybe I’ll be able to make it to day 80 for the next one. :)
So for tonight, my 1 hour of code is going to be going through the beginning of Professional AngularJS by Valeri Karpov. I was recommended this book by a friend that works at Google, who was told this is one of the better AngularJS books out there right now, and I trust his judgement with things like this. So this will be where I start for now. Who knows, maybe this will be able to help me find a job in my area. Either way, it will let me learn something awesome and that’s an A+ in my book.
So awesome readers out there, my word of advice to you is this: don’t give up. Even when life gets extra shitty, try and wait it out so you can keep going from where you left off. My hope is there’s got to be a positive somewhere in the future — I just have to find where it is. So stay classy, and as always, code on.
