Bit of a late blog this week. I was deep into some coding until late last night, and then got absolutely flattened by my body's immune response to the COVID booster I received around lunchtime. I went from fine to feeling sicker than I've been in a long time in the span of about five minutes. I'm taking a sick day from work today, and with two more days off for the Thanksgiving holiday, I have plenty of time to lay around and recover. Maybe I'll get some solid learning in, too!

This past week started with a whimper: some personal frustrations boiled over and I didn't get a whole lot done for a couple days. However, some long days on the tail end of the week helped me regain momentum.

Learning Paths 📚

CS50x

I've been really enjoying this course. Like, really enjoying it. It's hard - C is different enough from Python that it gives me fits sometimes - but I'm learning a lot and really wish I'd run across a course like this when I was an undergrad. I suspect I would have been hooked.

The big battle this week has been working to understand how code in C interacts with memory. The programming concepts are familiar (loops, arrays, etc.) but the way C handles types has taken some getting used to. Thankfully, the lecturer is fantastic and I have a good coding mentor to help me understand how to get past the rough patches. I'm certain this course, even though I'm not taking it for any sort of credit, will help me grow as a programmer.

DevOps in the Cloud

I got my first look at Ansible this week. Even though I didn't dig in particularly far, I can see how powerful a tool it is, and I'm really digging it. I am excited to see how it integrates with Terraform and Jenkins.

Job Search 🔎

This past week's focus was moving forward in my learning, so I didn't make much progress on the job search front. My goal this week is to take a hard look at my resume and projects (thanks for the advice, Lou!) and try to make them more appealing and more demonstrative of my abilities.

0 applications; 0 interviews; 1 rejection

Wrap-up 🍩

Today is probably going to be a wash, but a couple more days off gives me the opportunity to relax a bit and make some forward progress. I really want to fix whatever is preventing me from getting interviews right now, because there seem to be plenty of open positions into which I can see myself fitting. Time to do work.

Onward and upward!