Starting is hard, especially when you’re starting over. Motivation helps. Competition is a great motivator for me so when I realized that in the time I’ve spent trying to convince my current employer to send me to code school to become a dev (well over a year), some guy named Sean Wang over at Free Code Camp actually went out and became a dev… IN A YEAR, I was motivated. I am gunning for ya, Sean Wang… But, I’m going to wait a little while before I tell you this because if I lose steam after a few days that would be pretty sad.

I found him on FCC, but I have linked to his blog hosted on Github here.

Rather than sit here and feel sad that nothing is happening for me yet, I’m going to make it happen. And I’m going to document everything I do and learn along the way so that I can look back and feel good about what I’ve done/how far I’ve come and show myself that I can do this, even after the next rejection email comes in. How can anyone say that I’m not ready to become a developer if I am developing things? I don’t get it. I know developers. There is a very w i d e spectrum of who is considered worthy of the title “developer” and I must fall somewhere in there, i mean damn. What’s a girl got to do around here.

Today, I spent much of the day trying to figure out how to host a blog on github pages. It took an embarassing length of time for me to accomplish what feels like very little, but I figured it out. Most of the time was spent figuring out how I want to approach it. There are a million ways to do do it.

How do I feel about my way? I’m happy. I learned about Jekyll and how you can use it to build static web pages without a database. I’m not good at expressing my excitement for things but let me just say that Jekyll is amazing.

AMAZING!

To give credit where it is due… I ended up following this guide to set up Jekyll.

I have used wordpress before but I think I will come to prefer Jekyll as a more lightweight option. I tend to get distracted and overwhelmed when there’s a lot going on in the UI so perhaps this minimalistic approach to blogging will make it easier for me to focus more on getting it down and less on getting it juuuust right. Because nothing is ever ‘done’ enough for me. I’ll just call that Agile, OK.

And that’s all I did today.

Resources
Style Guide / markdown
Great article about all things jekyll