After two years of taking a step back and trying other things, I’ve returned to the land of the living and have dived head first back into all things technical. Too many years of mediocrity had taken their toll on the passion for programming I once had. First computer when I was three, second when I was eight, first website in ‘96 when I was 18, and first programing job a couple years later. The journey from novice to professional was a quick one. I went from basic html to installing scripts, then to modifying scripts, then to writing custom code. From there it wasn’t long until I was programming large sites and doing everything else involved in maintaining large high-traffic sites. I learned on the job and learned just enough as I needed it. Never getting to use the latest and greatest but always stuck with old PHP and Perl code. I knew PHP pretty well, Javascript less well, a bit of Linux, some FreeBSD, quite a bit of MySQL, and on and on. I knew enough and it got me by.

Later I would leave the self-employed world for a jaunt on the corporate side of things, where what little passion I had left would die. Working on 10 year old code that had been touched by at least as many people. Cajoling it into doing things it was never designed to do. Never able to take the time for a decent rewrite because hey, it works well enough. Well, no, it doesn’t. It has more bugs than a crack den in the ghetto but that’s ok. I’ll add in some new code and try my best to patch it together. Who care’s about quality, right?

But that was then, this is now, and a two year respite has allowed me to reset mentally. Thanks to sites like Free Code Camp, Codecademy, and The Odin Project I’m all-in and learning very quickly. My overall plan includes the MEAN stack, Ruby, Rails, and then later Objective-C and Swift. Right now I’m working through an Angular tutorial as well as the Learn You Node stuff. I like to work through two at the same time so I can switch back and forth to keep my mind fresh. I also take a quick walk if I get stuck to do a quick reset on my thinking and not just keep beating my head against a wall.

That said, I’ll end this here and see if I can get it posted. It’s been two years since I’ve attempted a blog post and I’m having to relearn how to use Octopress. I have the source code to the page but not the source of my previous posts or how I had it set up. Yea, I’m regretting deleting all of my programming stuff way back when. Would be nice to have it now.