This is It

Well, I have officially quit my job! This week will consist of frantically finishing up the last of Thinkful’s requirements so I can start focusing on looking for a job. What does that mean exactly?

Routine, routine, routine! A strict routine helped me stay on-track while enrolled with Thinkful and working a full-time job. I’ve quickly realized that a routine will be even more important now. My days will consist of daily code challenges, being active in Thinkful’s Slack community, iterating over my projects, and applying for jobs. Of course, I have to pack at some point too, because I am moving to Los Angeles one week from today! In a lot of ways, the real work starts now.

More than anything, Thinkful has taught me that I can do a lot more in a 24-hour period than I ever thought possible. A career in Web Development is something I’ve wanted to achieve for 2 years. Now that I’m at the brink of employment, I wonder what took me so long to get here (after all, Thinkful is only a 6-month program). I won’t get into the details of my personal journey, but I will say that timing is everything. I was not in a position to make Thinkful my first priority when I first gained interest in Web Development, so I don’t know if I would have finished. I also needed major motivation. Motivation (the “why”) comes in many forms for many people. For me, it was to get out of the Casino industry and out of Vegas altogether. Whenever I got frustrated with my job, my mentor, Rachel, always told me to channel that frustration into motivation. It worked for me! Working in the Casino industry was mostly a positive experience, but it was not where I wanted to be. Rachel definitely helped me stay focused when things got chaotic.

I know I’ve said this before, but I can’t say it enough: I’ve learned so much more in the past 5 months than I did in the prior 18 months that I tried to learn Web Development on my own. I didn’t know how to learn prior to Thinkful. Looking at documentation was overwhelming and I didn’t know the basic foundations well enough to even know where to start. Here’s a quick recap of the stuff I’ve worked on since enrolling in Thinkful:

• With the Disneyland Quiz, I learned to structure my data in a more logical way by using a state object to hold all of my variables.
• In Kitty Opinions, I got comfortable with APIs by using 3 different ones in a single, frontend app.
• The Sequelize Blog App was when I fell in love with building my own APIs (and when I realized that I prefer SQL over MongoDB)
• The HospitAlert Demo was my first full-stack app.
• The Hot-and-Cold game was my first React app.
• The updated version of HospitAlert features a React client and a separate Node API. This was my first app with authentication using Facebook OAuth.

Looking back at all of the work that I’ve done, work that I would have never been able to do 6 months ago, helps to combat Imposter Syndrome. Every single one of these projects could benefit over some iteration, which is great because it’ll help me keep my skills sharp as I look for a job. Having left the Golden Nugget, a major chapter of my life has officially ended. But you know what they say when one door closes…

Thanks for reading!