An Awakening
It’s been a pivotal time of my life. You know those ones. . .something happens – or a series of little somethings happen – to jostle your existential awareness and make you re-evaluate the bubble of a world that you’ve built for yourself.
This time around, my series of little somethings has included the passing of a good friend, some trouble navigating my freelancing contractor career, and a lot of scary illness – in the family, and my own.
I’ve spent weeks wrangling the implications of this new awareness, and while I have a few more knots to work out, one surprising outcome has emerged from all my soul searching.
I miss code.
Random, right? Let me attempt to explain (to myself).
Back in my ancient days of youth, the internet was new and exciting and I couldn’t believe how much people could make things GO online just by typing in a bunch of squiggles and characters.
When I realized that those squiggles and characters could solve problems – like they could build actual solutions and fill actual needs – I was hooked. I spent hundreds of hours coming up with digital solutions for issues I’d discovered (and some I’d created). . .and then the internet got easier. Blame all those drag and drop, WYSIWYG applications.
And I got lazy. . .then distracted.
Decades later, my expertise is writing and SEO – so still very tech adjacent – and I love it. I also got really good at WordPress.
But I’ve always known that this is not enough for me.
You know how you can get so thoroughly engaged in a piece of work that you forget to eat and you refuse to sleep for days on end until the project is done? Like, even if no one paid you to do it?
I have only ever been that kind of obsessed with my work when I was coding, and it’s been too many years since my last big geeky project.
So I recently made the big decision to drop everything (unless it’s something that will pay the bills for now) and rebuild my programming cred.
Step one is to fill my knowledge gaps to become a full stack web developer (because my current skill set places me closest to that qualification) and then work towards and gain a Machine Learning Engineer nanodegree.
After that, I’ve got my eye on AI. I want to be a Natural Language Processing expert, and I will rest for a little bit when I can do some AI work in the field of healthcare.
That’s the master plan. . .at least for the career (and mind and soul) area of my life. As you can probably tell, I’m turning Cup Tea Lilieni dot com – plus my other passion project websites – into my ultimate, software engineering portfolio.
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