I just realized that it has been a year since I REALLY started to code! Last September, I enrolled in Flatiron School's Online Software Engineering Bootcamp. I graduated in mid-April, and started a new job in July.
As I look back at my GitHub commit history, I can trace the path of my year. I was a part-time student from September through December, and I can see that show up in light green. I can see my two-week hiatus from coding across the December holidays, when the kids were out of school. I can see the darker green contributions across January and February, when I switched into the full-time program.
And then the year got interesting...I can see my activity dropped in mid-March, which was when the schools shut down, and I started balancing full-time homeschooling for my two boys on top of tackling the full-time bootcamp schedule. I can see my activity increase again in April, when my husband was laid off for a few valuable weeks, enabling him to take over the homeschooling duties while I was able to finish up at Flatiron and graduate.
I can see my activity post-graduation, as I again balanced the full-time homeschooling with a job search, while also trying to keep up with my blogging, side projects, and teaching myself data visualization. See that blank week in May? That was when I was computer-less, after my son knocked over a cup of coffee into my laptop, while showing me his daily math work!
July brought a new job, and August brought a move to a new fixer-upper house. September brought a new school year, with the kids finally back to in-person school...at least for now.
One year in, I'm reflecting back on what I've achieved, breaking into a new career while parenting through a global pandemic. Could I have accomplished more, under a more normal set of circumstances? Yes! Am I happy with what I did accomplish, despite the unexpected challenges? Yes! One year in, I'm looking forward to continuing to learn new frameworks and approaches, and continuing to periodically write about what I'm exploring.
See you in Year Two!
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