Hi Reader,

I've been thinking a lot lately about who I want to be and what I envision making of my life as a developer. When I decided to switch gears from the world of nutrition and health research I only knew one thing: I wanted to code.

So I went to a bootcamp, put in the hours, graduated, and just recently emerged onto the job market.

I thought the the quickest and most effective way to land a job fast would be to deepen my skills in Ruby and Rails given that those were the focus of my software engineering immersive. I gathered the best resources I could find and took off to the races.

Here's what actually happened:

As you can see, I had a pretty steady cadence going on between October of 2019 and March of 2020. There are a few gaps during the holidays, but on the whole I held pretty steady in github contributions.

It was in late March that I decided to focus on Ruby and Rails, and as you can see I didn't make a whole lot of progress. Why?

I wasn't interested

Did I love the challenge of back-end programming? Absolutely. Solving logic-based problems provided me with hits of adrenaline... But I learned from my time in the program that I didn't want to be an algorithm master. And yet, here I was trying to force myself to love it and consequently getting nowhere.

Have you ever done things you knew you hated and were against your own best interest but for some reason you persevered after them because your brain said you had to? That was me.

Then a tweet saved my life.

Seriously, this tweet was the best thing that could have happened for me. I read it and found myself giving myself permission to just do what I want. I gave myself permission to go out and seek out joy and not just employment.

I won't say it wasn't difficult. Having committed to an income share agreement for my 15k tuition at my coding bootcamp, I carried a lot of guilt about my decision to not pursue a job in the technical skills I had learned during my program. I wallowed in my sunk cost fallacy for a little while, even.

But unemployment can't go on forever.

Having been out of the workforce for a while, I felt time clipping away at my heels. I had to do something, but I was back at square one it seemed. How does one become a front-end developer without proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JS? You can't.

So I pulled out the Skillcrush Front-End Developer course I bought SIX MONTHS prior to starting my bootcamp and got to work. I'm currently learning about responsive web design, and I couldn't be any happier.

I also started looking into internships that didn't require any experience so that I could start doing on the job learning. I'm lucky enough to have found one, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

And that's where I am now.

There's so much I need to learn and a whole lot more to grow as a developer. I try not to beat myself up about it- I've only been coding for 10 months, and only just three weeks ago gave myself permission to follow the beat of my own drum instead of following what everyone else says is best for me.

It's going to be worth it.

So expect front-end content content from me moving forward.

I'll definitely be going back to my Ruby course at some point to make sure I hold on to the technical skills I do already have, but that's not where the bulk of my energy will be going.

Happy Coding!
-Cristal

Up next: Responsive Web Design