Past

I have had a really long, bumpy relationship with coding. I'm a naturally fast learner, so when I run into something with as many hurdles as coding, I've never had enough grit to make it through. Or at least, that's what I tell myself.

At the earliest stages of my journey, I had online profiles on chat sites that I customized with HTML and CSS before I even really understood what those were.

When I was in high school, I traded my Physics courses for Computer Science courses. I got to learn web design and make my own games instead of doing math on paper, what a dream! At the peak of my high school tech career, I used a Logitech webcam and my own API to design something similar to a Ring doorbell before those really got popular.

Nowadays, I know enough about these technical topics to hold a conversation, but if you actually pressed me about some of them and held my feet to the fire, I probably wouldn't be able to give you solid answers. For my fellow Americans, if you had Spanish classes in high school and haven't spoken the language since, you'll know how I feel: a stuttering, bumbling mess.

Future

So, I want to make an effort to fix that. How are things going to change?

I've always struggled with motivation, but I've never struggled with passion. That, I've got buckets full of. So, let's take all that passion and turn it into something fruitful.

You all may have heard of the recent round of layoffs at Forem last week. While I was unfortunately one of the unlucky few impacted, I'm not going to let that stop me from connecting with over one million of you amazing people each and every week.

I'm feeling motivated enough to do 100 Days of Code this October, so let's see how it'll turn out. With this post, I'm committing myself publicly to the challenge. Maybe a true developer will be born out of this venture.

I think this time, I have a few major motivations that will make the difference:

1. I'm already at the best place to be a CodeNewbie: dev.to
2. I have dream projects I want to be able to turn into reality.
3. I'm willing to take it slow and understand that there are going to be a lot of things that I don't get the first go around.

You can follow along with my daily progress on Twitter:

I'll post weekly here so I don't spam you too much - and just to make it easier on the ol' wrists. 15 posts is a lot less than 100 posts.

If anyone has been waiting to make the effort to learn how to code, this is your sign! I'm following The Odin Project, so you can feel free to learn along with me at your own pace. I'm inspired by all of you and hope that I can inspire some newbies myself along the way.

If I get anything wrong, feel free to leave a helpful comment! See you soon! 💕