13:19 - This morning I had a meeting with a career coaching service to determine if it would be at all helpful to me. I decided that having someone to be accountable to, and also a deadline for a goal would be useful.

I signed up for a one hour session with a woman named Vicki Moultry for Friday, September 25th at 9am. (Yes, it’s in my calendar). Factoring in Laura’s wedding and most likely 2-3 weeks of fashion work, I think that’s a good time to have it.

So that’s a short-term deadline. What is the short-term goal I want to have accomplished by then? I certainly want to be done with The Odin Project’s Web Development 101 section by the end of next week and into Ruby Programming. I think it is realistic to say that I should be into Ruby on Rails by September 25th. I can obviously update that, but honestly up to that point the lessons look like review for me.

Today was also the day I had said would be when I reassess the money situation. Well, it’s not great. I’ve started looking at part-time, temp, and barista work to pad my way. On the one hand, I don’t want to be a moocher. On the other hand, we have saved and saved and saved, and right now we have a buffer that will carry me through about 10 months before going dry.

I don’t think it will take me 10 months to find a job. I think it might take something like that amount of time to find a job in web development. The Code Newbie podcast is super encouraging, though. Like the one I listened to today: 8 months from 0-employed?! Less than, really. I really do think that if I put in the time every day and combine that with the help from the career coach, I can do this. I just have to be… I don’t want to say fearless, but certainly more confident and just keep plugging away.

From today’s meeting, I think I know what I want from my job, I just need to write it down.

1. I want to be challenged
2. I want to work on something/for a company that helps people
3. I want to work on a team, but also make individual contributions to the team.
   • Smaller company/organization where maybe structure isn’t too rigid and specialization isn’t too high.
   • Small team that allows growth.
4. I want to work somewhere that encourages critical thinking and problem solving.
5. I don’t want to do busy work.

21:40 - The nice thing about having dabbled in all of this before is that I don’t have to struggle as hard to absorb a lot of the big, fundamental core concepts (Object-Oriented Programming, what is a string, etc).

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I don’t have to go through the review. Especially since Ruby is a completely new language to me. It does seem to have some pretty neat features so far, though…

Time for bed.