2015: my year of coding in review.

Wow, what a year.  

I started over this year.  And... it's really, really hard to start over.  It's hard because it kinda means throwing away what you are comfortable with.  But that's exactly what I did at the beginning of this year.  I walked away from 7 years of working as a scientist in pharmaceuticals and hoped that somehow I would reboot myself as a web developer by the end of year.

Here's a big list of stuff I did this year:

• I got a coding internship.
• I commuted 3 hours every day on the train.
• I read a lot of coding books.
• I spent my weekends doing online courses on treehouse & codecademy.
• I got a full-time coding job.
• I read Sandi Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby twice.
• I got some new titles: full-stack developer | Ruby on Rails dev | coder | web developer.
• I coached at a RailsGirls weekend workshop.
• I got a lot better at Ruby on Rails.
• I didn't learn as much Dutch as I hoped to. :-/
• I went to Burning Man.
• I bought a place in Amsterdam and got rid of that crappy long train commute.
• I learned some jQuery, AngularJS, Polymer & ReactJS.
• I hosted an all-day talk/workshop/training for RailsGirls_NL.  First time I've done anything like that before.  This was one of the highlights of my year.  I met cool people and got to talk about coding... total win/win situation for me.
• I get to be creative in how I build stuff and solve problems.  I feel that my input, contributions, and ideas are valued.
• I don't have anxiety attacks as often.
• I enjoy going to work now.
• I feel I am the most in control of my career that I've ever been.

This time last year, I really had no idea what the hell I was doing. I had just started following online Rails tutorials and built my first Rails app by following step-by-step instructions and not really knowing what exactly the code meant.  I read some blogs from people that I done this before me, and I was trying to kinda follow what they did.  But, I didn't know anyone that had taught themselves how to code while being in a foreign country.  I tried not to worry about that initially (there's always remote work, right?) and hoped for the best.

But, somehow, I'm ending my year as a gainfully employed developer in an amazing city with a great tech scene.  It wasn't magic, it wasn't talent, and it certainly wasn't easy... it took a ridiculous amount of work and frustration to get here.  And I absolutely believe that anyone else can do that exact same thing if they desire to.

I hosted a RailsGirls meetup and give my first coding workshop!

So excited to write about this.  One year after building my first Rails app, I organized and presented my first coding workshop.  It's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do.

I have been kinda consumed lately with worrying and preparing for giving my first coding workshop.  I hosted ~18 coders at our local RailsGirls event for all day workshop.  I introduced the concepts of MVC and styling with CSS and the Bootstrap gem as we worked on adding functionality to a Tamagotchi - virtual pet app.  It was fun, but stressful for me.  And it was only stressful because I'm not used to being the center of attention or speaking for ~5 hours straight!

That's me! Presenting to ~18 bright (mainly women) coders.

Everyone was supportive of one another, and I really felt like we created a safe, friendly, open environment for learning about coding with Ruby on Rails.  I'm really proud of that.   I would love to do another workshop in a few months.  It's just kind of exhausting and intense to plan for 5 hours of coding content + activity.  I really had no idea how long my presentation would actually take or if folks would be bored out of their minds.

I was thinking it would be great to offer another, more low-key meetup option like a "Coffee & Code" type event where a small study group could get together for a couple hours and get help on working on their own projects or online tutorials/courses from a coach or 2.  It would take the pressure off of one person to present and host an all-day event.

Overall it was a great experience and empowering to be a room filled with bright women all interested and focused on coding!  I am, of course, thankful to work for a company that supports activities like this too!

Of course I have been neglecting blogging lately, but I have still been trying to learn new stuff- I've learned some more Angular & I've been playing around with Rails API with a Angular client-side app, but this experience really trumps anything else I've been doing otherwise!