Here we at the beginning of 2012. It’s time for new ideas in a New Year.
This week, I started building a new future for myself by attending my first of twelve weeks of learning at Code Academy. Yes, that’s right, this 52-year old woman, a former computer programmer and software developer who spent ten years away from programming after twenty years in the IT business is going back to building things digitally.
I can’t wait to learn more. This is so much fun.
Here’s the truth. For nine years, I never thought returning to software development was possible. Yet in the past year, my brain healing seems to have reached a point where I am feeling cognitively better than I think I ever have before. I cannot tell you how exciting this is.
I feel like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life!
The core portion of the curriculum at Code Academy involves learning Ruby on Rails, an open source framework for fast web development. In addition, there will be many special sessions including weekly lessons on HTML5 and CSS3. There will also be plenty of guest speakers on subjects related to the booming tech start-up community in Chicago.
At the end of the 12-week course, my classmates and I will each need to have something to show to a large audience of tech and start-up industry folks.
I plan to create a digital photography web application that, believe it or not, I actually intend to use. That application will include my portfolio along with a bunch of other functionality and will replace the barely functioning WordPress portfolio that is currently linked to and described as “Under Construction” in the top right column of this blog.
Stay tuned to see the results!
When the core portion of my photography application is done, I will give it away. The source code will go on Github for anyone who wants it.
This is all very exciting and time consuming and scary and fun and I hope it will be the happy ending to my long and sordid story of recovery from heavy metal toxicity.
I do intend to succeed. There is no other option.
I will be blogging about my experience here in the coming weeks and I hope you follow along.
Earlier today, as I was ping-ponging between two Ruby language guides, I was interrupted by one of my teenagers, “I left my tooth fairy pillow on your bed, Mom. It has a hole in it.”
I hand-stitched the hole, returned the precious cargo it to its happy owner, and resumed my Ruby language studies. But not before I read the saying that is printed on the tiny patchwork pillow:
“Every new dream is a journey of the heart.”
Happy New Year.
