I've been away from active development for a long time now. I had a lot of health and environmental roadblocks that I've almost taken care of completely which have allowed me to return my focus to my dream. I encountered setbacks constantly over the years including being kicked out of a developer school, not believing in my abilities, the complications that arise from having a school aged kid, and finding what my core passion is with development.
No path worth travelling is ever easy, so I've persisted with the help of a good friend that's always pushed me to keep going back to it and stop being afraid of the unknown.
I shifted my desktop into my "office" which is away from the main living areas, put CrunchBang++ on an old laptop so I've got freedom to code anywhere I like, started writing about my days on my Telegram channel, and found some resources for open source projects I care enough about to give my time to and thus improve my skills with some overarching difference to humanity happening at the same time.
Headphones and good music along with a drive to make a better life for myself, my son, my future husband and children with him, and the world by extension is what will make me sit down every day. Being creative with technology and helping people is where I feel most at home.
Today my physical anxiety is really bad (stomach flipping for no reason, increased heartrate, just been dealing with antagonistic people recently that put me in a state of physical terror even though I'm mentally fine) but I've made myself get in the zone anyway, tell myself some affirmations about my career and physical safety until my body is calm, and distract myself with the Colt Steele bootcamp on Udemy.
Colt Steele's bootcamp is really good from what I've seen even though I'm only about 5% through it so far. I know most things contained in here already from dev school but he goes into detail about things that my client/server terms didn't. I'm looking forward to powering through and finishing it.
I struck up conversation with a man at a bus stop on Friday and he mentioned he needed a website built for him again so I said I'd help him out if I could use it for my portfolio. Two friends of mine have offered me employment after I demonstrate my skills a bit more on open source and personal projects. More motivation for me to go hard out with completing the course, and also finishing my own developer website that I bought the domain for like a year ago, AND writing about my progress.
I'll also keep going through the backend developer roadmap on roadmap.sh because I want to specialise in backend development. I love databases, APIs, networking, etc, that's where I can lose hours of my time in bliss of problem solving with data.
I'm reframing my anxiety today with the phrase "I am excited to move forward and take control of my dream."
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