All Over the Place

It has been a bit of a roller coaster for me lately, except without the rails for guidance. I'm not necessarily complaining, but it is certainly making my head spin.

I'll start by saying that this state of affairs is not a bad thing; it simply is the state of affairs. My direction changes every week, it seems. I don't really like telling people what I'm working on because I know by this point that something will change and I'll no longer be working on that thing I told them about.

This could account for my quietness here, despite having announced my return.

For a little bit, I had a bit of a programming mentor. We shared similar interests, played the same games, and really got along great for a while. During this time, I plunged head-first back into my C lessons. I read information from as many as three different resources, depending on which one was most convenient for the place and time. I also took up Python with an interesting approach of "code this and the instructor will show you why it works afterwards". That lasted until I reached the abstract "object" part of Python, and my mentor spent two hours trying to explain it over chat. I ended up grasping the idea, but I put off going back to the Python lessons. Instead, I read about more C.

This lasted until my mentor no longer had the time to dedicate to helping me. I continued, regardless, but I had a bit of a crisis in the meantime. The work I was putting in to learn C was for some pretty lofty goals -- goals that wouldn't be achieved for possibly years to come. Even the programs I had been brainstorming to automate certain systems at the printshop would have taken an enormous amount of time, and until I had something to show for it, I felt like I was a ship taking on water. The skill I was learning wasn't going to help me or my company by the time I could use it!

I'll take this moment to explain that I am part-owner of the above-mentioned printshop. Since 2012, when I became office manager, I have simply been putting in the time I need to and waiting to punch my card at the end of the day. My job started out being rewarding, but a combination of bad experiences with clients and the daily shifting deadlines had jaded me. The other business owners and myself spoke about selling the business, and since that was the plan, I didn't think too deeply on the details. Now, I realize that no one will pay what we ask if they don't think there is enough worth to justify it. Part of that worth is the online presence my business has.

During this epiphany, I was browsing some free coding classes. It was a Sunday morning. My fiancé was sleeping in. I was either going to find a free class or I was going to pay Blizzard money to reactivate my World of Warcraft account. Since nobody wants to teach C for free (or, if they do, they're hard to find), I was willing to take whatever I could get. What was the first thing that popped up for me?

HTML/CSS.

The course was on Codeacademy.com. They claimed you could learn everything you needed to know about basic HTML and CSS in 7 hours. I knew it wouldn't take me that long. So I completed the course in 6 hours. After that, I did a dummy page for a tabled project I had been mulling over. I showed it to my fiancé and after his outpouring of positivity, I began working on the design for my company's website.

I realize where this path takes me. Jquery/Javascript. MySQL. PHP. XML. There isn't much here that I can apply to C. But, there is a lot of information out there that I can accumulate. And once I learn it, it won't go away. This is a topic I can apply immediately to my work and will also help me immensely down the road.

So that is my state of affairs. In other news, House of Cards is an amazing series and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone (Kevin Spacey is fantastic). And I'll leave with a note that there could be a slight shift from C programming to web programming.