I got called a rockstar today. I’m trying to make myself believe it. All I have left to do that’s required is the recursion stuff. Then there’s a bunch of extra credit that I want to try to go all the way through. Code School has a new (free) intro to JavaScript module that I also want to see if I can find too easy.

Non programming fluff the past few days. Family was in town and I’m starting to pack up the apartment I’ve lived in for four years. Subconsciously I seem to think the faster I clean out my apartment the sooner I get to move down to California. I think my subconscious is going to be disappointed when I have a bare apartment and another month of work in Salem.

In other news I am starting to hoard nerdy t-shirts. I bought a couple of Welcome to Nightvale shirts as well as some ‘verse (Whedonverse, that is) related ones from Once upon a Tee (Buffy, guns don’t kill people, and I hate the homeless, specifically).

Getting me through the work days/coding breaks lately are a couple of podcasts I just discovered:

Welcome to Night Vale
Throwing Shade
and an old favorite, back when I had time to watch their livestream The Co-optional Podcast (formerly TGS Podcast).

Impostor syndrome describes a situation where someone feels like an impostor or fraud because they think that their accomplishments are nowhere near as good as those of the people around them. Usually, their accomplishments are just as good, and the person is being needlessly insecure.

• Geek Feminism Wiki
  The lack of posting this week is entirely related to the above quote. I spent the long weekend working on my pre-course work for HackReactor. It was awesome and fun and sometimes frustrating but I was powering through it. Then somewhere on Sunday, I got stuck. It was a stuckness of monumental proportions and looking back on it now I find it funny.

I have a method to my madness with coding. I add things, test them and add some more until I get stuck at a point where either I’m not sure how to implement something to make it do what I want or something I thought I’d implemented isn’t doing what I expected it to. Then I do a bunch of Googling, look at some examples, hack those examples to fit into my code and all is well again.

And that’s how it should have gone when I got stuck on Sunday. Instead I kept banging my head against the brick wall of stuckness, moving some code bits, rewording some code bits, and finally starting all over again in frustration. By Tuesday night as I had a Google Hangout date with my best friends, I was freaking out. Please keep in mind that I’d received this homework on Friday and I don’t have to finish it until I start school in November and at the point of my stuckness I was about half way through with all of it.

So yeah, the freak out was definitely unwarranted. I made it this far but I’m still worried I’m making a bad choice/going to be that one person in their program who doesn’t get a job/nobody will ever love me. You know normal fears.

It’s a day by day process telling myself I’m good enough. Today I finally came back to the thing I was stuck on and sorted out my issues in about an hour. Now I’m on to the last step, my best friend recursion.

Early on in my transition to girl powered coder-dom I made a conscious decision to get everything I could that was pink. I like to flaunt my girliness and for as geeky and tomboyish as I can be, I love pink. My phone cover is pink, my tennis shoes are magenta and now I have a pink cover on my MacBook and a cheapo pink wireless mouse. Next on my list is some sort of bright pink thumb drive. I like to be geeky chic, if you will.

I’ve been in love with Lorde (she’s only 16!) for a little while now, her song Royals has been playing on the Portland alt rock station for the past few months and I immediately went and found all of her music. I’ve been using this song as my confidence boost. I like to repeat “I’ll find my own bravado” to myself as I work on coding or just randomly at work. Not out loud though. I’m not that crazy - yet.

More cat pictures!, you cry? Happy to oblige. Jack again, being his standard needy self. Someday I’ll get a good picture of my other boy, a tuxedo named Isaac (he’s camera-shy).

As an addition to my post below about App Academy. I’m starting to feel less confident in myself. I did well on the second coding test and I’m through the first interview now but according to the website I assumed that meant it was my only interview. Not so said the TA who put me through a coding test. So ugh. I was nervous, I got it done, but not prettily and I made some stupid mistakes. When I finished I was upset and called both my parents and my best friend. My dad was the best about the whole situation. He just wanted to make sure I wouldn’t give up if I didn’t get in to this ONE program. He was right.

I spent the rest of the evening prepping applications to the other programming schools in the Bay Area. I finished one for Coding Dojo and got an email this morning to set up an interview next week! I also applied to HackReactor which has suddenly vaulted itself to the top of my list. Not gonna lie, the free gym and really high success rate of graduates makes me happy. Both of those programs are also in November so they are my three that I’m most excited about. I also will probably apply to Dev Bootcamp and Hackbright, but they aren’t until next year and I don’t want to wait that long if I don’t have to.

Every morning when I wake up Jack stretches to fill up the entire bed. It’s like he’s mocking me as I get ready to go to work. Look what I get to do today.

The quietness of this weblog isn’t a reflection on my life, more like the inverse of my life now. I’ve started a more grownup sleep schedule then “wake up 20 minutes before you have to leave for work, roll out of bed and throw your hair in a ponytail”. I now go to bed at the same time every night and wake up to my alarm (no snoozing! okay, maybe one hit of the snooze button).

All this so I can wake up at 5:30 and start a version of Couch to 5k. But me being me I couldn’t do the normal old c25k, no! Instead I chose zombies (because I have loved zombies since before they were cool, yeah that’s right, I’m being that annoying person who talks about bands no one knows)! Zombies, Run! or actually their Zombie 5k intro to be exact is my zombified program. You can find my runs (and the ridiculous pop music I find necessary to wake me up at 5:30 am on my ZombieLink profile). My goal is to finish the 5k program and then start their actual Season content. I have promised to gift myself with expensive, pretty running shoes if I get that far. On my current shortlist:

Hoka One One Stinson Tarmac

Supposedly this is like “running on pillows” and is designed for the type of running I do - on concrete as I run around the concrete jungle of my city’s downtown. It’s the most expensive one on my list and my least pretty choice, but it’s still at the top because I think it would be super comfy.

Nike Air Max Tailwind+ 5

Probably the best mix of bright and comfy. I love anything that screams NEON PINK. Only when I exercise am I a girly girl.

Nike Air Pegasus+ 29

Probably my fav color combo, but it’s out of stock in my size so it’s probably not going to happen. I’m keeping it on the list just in case.

And there we go. I’ve added another obsessive hobby to my life. But at least the running is the first physically good thing I’ve become obsessed with. I think I need to find a zombie t-shirt to run in…

I’m up late listening to the entertaining people discuss numbers and psychics on Coast to Coast. I’m also sitting on a mattress on the floor of my best friend’s apartment. There are two tiny Chihuahuas snoring at my feet and I just want to grin.

I’m on vacation from the real world for a week. I took a week off, flew down to California and I’m basking in the sun and the closeness of friends who really get me. I’ve even made a new friend in the past few weeks and of course she lives down here too. I’m tired but happy and I’m positive now that this is the place I want to live. All the time. Everyday.

I want to move to California. I want to shake things up and become a web developer and live the life I fantasize about. I kept waffling between computers and accounting, but accounting was the safe and easy way out. I knew the path. I knew it would be another two years before I had to start making tough decisions. For computers, the tough decisions start NOW. I need to get down to California, try to get into a program and then figure out what exactly it means to work in a little development company that could disappear in 5 years. It’s terrifying and yet I can’t stop smiling.

Also, I’m back with A Small Orange hosting. I just loved them too much not to go back.