Change is in the Air

A quote from the CEO of the company I work at currently is the title of this first blog post, which also summarizes the goal in making changes to this website.

I have made minor updates to my statically generated website (thanks Jekyll) since its birth right around my time of entering my career. I have only come to submit changes when I needed to a) apply for a job or b) update my resume so I don't forget I did that one-off thing that was really cool. But since then I have made it further into this dark forest of software development, specifically web development. As any developer can tell you, there is a lot to learn/do in a technical web development role and at least three different ways to everything that there is to learn/do.

My first entry into web development was while working as an intern on a pretty neat project at the company where I currently work. It was replacing a test reporting tool we were using, but had stopped using it. My boss was great and gave me a lot of freedom in what I was doing so with my free time I looked into a good way to run tests in a special environment, report those results, and display them in a beautiful way. After making too many terrible python GUI applications with tkinter, I stumbled upon the python web framework: Django. It is here that I came to learn and love web development. What is great is that the tutorial I learned the framework was one by Django Girls, so thank you for getting me into web development!

In this application that eventually became my first "baby" of a project, I got to do some cool things. From writing code editors for the browser that could run tests on demand, to adding a Flappy Birds-like game that a user could play while waiting for their tests to run, I was able to learn enough to launch me into software development.

A jump to a full-time software developer role, a few years of experience (& plenty of mistakes), and getting a master's in computer science gets us to today. I hope I can share more experiences I've had in the future, but this'll do for today. Here I am writing this blog post with another static site generator, but it is cooler....Gatsby.

Cheers!