Reinventing me
This blog serves as a chronicle of my journey to transform myself from an 18 year career professional in the hospitality industry into a top-notch web developer. Once I am successful, I'd like to look back at the ups and downs, the stumbles along the way, and all the lessons I learned in the process. This is certainly not going to be an easy march but I have goals. Those goals which start and end with family, are sufficient motivation to keep me plugging away. Seeing how much I enjoy reading or seeing on youtube the journey of others, I thought _"why not?" ,_let's give this a try. So the target audience for this blog is first me, second any career-changer considering web development, and lastly anyone who's just in for kicks and grins.
So why web development? Honestly, why not? I've always been a tinkerer and lover of all things tech. I'm the "can you look at my printer" guy, the "how do you do that in excel?" guy and certainly the de facto techsupport at home. Whether it's repairing my son's broken HP laptop screen, or bringing an emachines desktop computer back to life with an Ubuntu install - it's what I do and love. I still remember my first geocities site I had up with no particular aim or purpose - just did it because I could with my WEbTV (who remembers those?!) Tech is that thing that I do and it doesn't feel like work - it can be frustrating at times -but it doesn't feel like a task, just like what I should be doing.
That brings us to now. I enjoy what I do and have been successful in it for some time now - but it's time for change. I had an opportunity for refelction during the winter of '15/'16 where I really explored the idea of what I wanted to do well into retirement and beyond. I was intrigued by the fact that upon close inspection, it wasn't what I'm currently doing. It is tech - specifically the development of 'things' called applications that are accessible through the web. That is where my research began. There are a MYRIAD of resources available online for a person to teach themselves various aspects of coding and just as many in-person bootcamps to do the same. As I work full-time and cannot take off from work for 14-32 weeks to attend such a bootcamp, I chose the online route. I picked up a few gems of knowledge from Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp (I really liked that one),a web dev course on Udemy, and an HTML5 course on edX.org.
Then, on July 8, 2016 I began my most rigorous foray into this world, the Front End Web Developer Nanodegree from Udacity.com.
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