I must admit, I thought blogging was kind of a fad that went away years ago, but I've been inundated with messages lately encouraging blogging. I attended the May Atlanta Ruby Users Meetup Group and heard a good talk on the power of blogging, and I've randomly stumbled across a few other blogs as of late (Josh Kemp &Mal on Rails) - so I decided to jump on the bandwagon. I guess worse case it's at least a time capsule that ten years from now I can go back in time and remember whatever crazy ideas I had back then!
Funny thing tonight is that I found a link pointing to blogger.com and thought I would check it out - turns out I already did so back in 2007 (My 2007 blog)! I forgot all about that post but clearly never stuck with it. So here it goes, and I'll see if I can actually stick at it for awhile this time.
So why am I here? I've had a very successful career for the last few years as an agency IT recruiter and now corporate technical recruiter, and I've made very good money doing so. I'm not even sure at this point if I wan to leave recruiting or not. I have however, long had a desire and interest in IT, and coding in general. I remember as early as elementary school being in the computer club (yes I was a nerd) and making a basic football field simulation in Basic, and in middle school I asked my parents to buy me a copy of Visual Basic for Applications when we got our first family computer. I even minored in Computer Science in college and got my feet wet with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I've just never taken the full plunge. Who knows, maybe it's just the childlike syndrome of wanting what you can't have. Now that I sit on the floor with our developers and see what they are doing all day, I think I want to do it because I'm not doing it now...
I've been bouncing back and forth for the last six months or so wondering if it is finally time to try to get into the IT field, and if I wanted to teach myself to be a developer. So about a month or two back, my then girlfriend and I were at Barnes & Noble, and I once again went over to the section with all of the books on programming, and asked her if I was nuts for wanting to buy a book to see if I really would enjoy teaching myself to code. She was of course very supportive and I'm now a few books in. I really haven't decided if I want to do this as a full time job, or if it's more just a hobby, but I've at least embarked on the journey. I do a lot of self-study at home and am working through the Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails 4 book, but also get some interesting problems from the developers that sit next to me at work (working on a Ruby file that takes in a wave file and then gives certain information related to that wave file, plays it forwards/backwards, etc).
So what's my plan moving foward? This blog turned out to be a little long, and I plan to keep them short and sweet moving forward. I know I'm pressed for time and wouldn't read anything this long, so I don't really expect other people to have time to either. As I've seen suggested though, I'm going to try to make a few entries a week documenting different things through my journey. I may leave them strictly related to coding or I may venture out into other topics. Maybe I'll even share my knowledge in the world of recruiting to help people looking for jobs gain some insight into what recruiters look for. Stay tuned and hopefully I'll have something of value at some point! :)
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