Next Steps

Greetings y’all,

This posts bares as my record for what I hope to accomplish in the next few months.

Current career situation

First off, back in August of 2025 I got a part time job that I loved. The team was amazing, I was learning new things all the time, and it was an amazing time for me. Then in December of that same year I got laid off by that company. It is a seasonal business and they were trying to expand but it didn’t end up working out this season.

I had mentally gotten settled in that company and was actually starting to build up my savings again before the layoff hit so this was quite the mental hit for me. This combined with the current job market and my experiences trying to get hired have pushed me in a new direction.

What fits the bill?

It’s time to learn some new skills that can give me “physical” projects to showcase my skills. You can’t do that with people or organizational skills, but you can do that with coding.

When I first got introduced to coding in University, it both intrigued me and frustrated me. It was fantastic that I got immediate feedback (whether the code worked or not) but I didn’t have the vocabulary to find my answers online. So after learning the basics of HTML, CSS, R, and Python, I moved on. While I enjoyed it I didn’t see how it could be useful.

Next steps

After dating my boyfriend for a few years now and especially with the AWS outage that happened a few months ago, I see how coding and understanding the digital architecture is essential with the current day and age, even with AI takeing over the low level tasks. With learning these skills also came the perk of creating projects like a full-time minecraft server for my family, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) for all of my files (so they don’t get scraped by AI), and making a personal website that fulfills my needs and interests.

So, where does that leave me now? With the little savings I had built up I decided to enroll in the boot.dev course to teach me the basics of where I need to go. While I could brute force it by googling everything incessantly, I lack the language to be able to ask what I’m looking for. And on the plus side, it is waaayyyy cheaper then a lot of other “coding bootcamps”. It also has a learning system that works well for my, number go up. I get a streak for everyday I learn and xp for every lesson I complete, number go up = Katie’s brain likes to do it.

With my current pace, I should finish up with the course by July or August of this year. By then I’ll have some projects done through the course and hopefully have a few more of my own. Then I can switch over my job hunt to hopefully something more long term then what I’ve been getting currently.