Yesterday was the first day of class. I arrived out of breath and sweaty from my exertions of trying not be late on the first day. Normally this would not be an issue but for some reason all three public transit methods from Alameda were backed up today. It’s the first time ever that I’ve seen the parking lot at the ferry terminal in Alameda completely full.

Tonight we had the orientation and installfest for WDI. It was really great to finally put some faces to the names I’ve been seeing on the contact sheet for the last couple of weeks. I was especially excited to see our instructors and learn more about them. We were separated into two groups and I was put into the Snakes Brigade (which makes me think of the House of Slytherin). I was a little disappointed because all the people I had already befriended were put into the Camel group, but I’m sure once I get to know everyone in my group, I’ll be just as happy. I mean one student in my group had a Totoro decal on her laptop so she’s already my new favorite person.

Those at Viator who voted in the 2012 election showing off the stickers

I am a member of the SF Ruby Meet Up group. Today I checked my email and saw a message thread from the group that made me feel sick to my stomach. A woman had sent a message to the group saying that she was looking for women developers for an internship and those interested should email her. The first couple replies were very reasonable ones from men giving her a heads up that it is illegal to discriminate based on gender, and that they would recommend not listing genders in job postings. These replies weren’t attacking her, they were factual, and she immediately sent a reply apologizing for the mistake and welcomed those of all genders to apply. Everything’s cool then, right?

A lot of my closest friends have been following along on my private Twitter account with my career journey this year, but I can finally talk about it a bit more publicly. In February I decided that it was time to start pursuing my passions again and get back to working on my career in tech. My goal since December of 2011 has been to be a professional front-end web developer instead of just a hobbyist front-end web developer. To that end I spent a couple months of my unemployment trying to advance my skills at home independently. HTML and CSS have been in the bag since I was a teenager but I knew I needed to finally learn JavaScript and JQuery and build up a portfolio. Unfortunately, this wasn’t progressing as quickly as I had hoped, as the resources I was using to learn weren’t very great. In addition, I really needed a source of income, so I was spending a lot of time applying to anything I could find in order to pay the bills. After 5 months of unemployment I eventually got a job as an Office Manager at Viator, Inc and my career goals were put on hold.

I’m starting to find that my life’s journey of starting out as a hobbyist front-end coder to aspiring theatre actress to aspiring English major to Director of Operations at a non-profit organization to professional print designer to Computer Arts student to aspiring video editor to transitional user interface designer to project coordinator to aspiring professional front-end developer to aspiring full-stack web developer is actually a pretty common kind of transition.

At times of change, the learners are the ones who will inherit the world, while the knowers will be beautifully prepared for a world which no longer exists.

Alistair Smith (via joshuakaufman)

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People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

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One of the things that I value in the workplace is efficiency. At every company I’ve worked for I’ve delighted in discovering and implementing more efficient methods of carrying out tasks. Being that I’m often the most tech savvy person at a lot of the companies I’ve worked for, I’ve strived to help them adopt newer technologies and methods of running more efficiently, whenever I’m in a position to do so. The managing teams are often very enthusiastic about this, sometimes I’m even part of the managing team, but I’ve sometimes found it very hard to get employees to accept and adopt newer technologies and/or newer methods. This serves as a great frustration for me; when I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to make things better for other people and they just dismiss it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site, and the major reason for that is that I’ve been building a completely new one. Since I’ve also been building sites for other people, this hasn’t happened as quickly as I had originally hoped, but I’m still alive and working away behind the scenes.