We are taught that competition brings out the best in us, and that only the strongest survive.

Fine. But not entirely true.

Competition tends to make us weed out people. So if you aren’t the winner, then you are the loser. There are always way more losers than winners. The problem with this is that it isn’t helpful to the goal of progression. To be progressive means that you need to move a group of people forward, not just one. In order to motivate a group of people, you need to learn something about working together, trusting each other, and communicating.

Yet, we live in a culture that bashes studying the liberal arts which teaches all of these things. Instead, we exhault anything that can be measured quantitatively since we believe that it will bring order the world around us. Instead of making a case against Liberal Arts, why not celebrate and exhault all that a liberal...

I am writing this post on the eve of my 1 year anniversary of quitting my job. It is a statement that I have somewhat mixed feelings about. On one hand, I know that I did the right thing. On the other hand, I hated being forced into that position.

Unlike many entrepreneurs, I didn’t quit my job because I was burning to do my own thing. I quit because I knew that I wasn’t being valued and it was time to leave. It just happened to occur in a part of my career where I believe that I was reaching the goals that I had been working so hard for.

I caution others to learn and fight for their worth. So many times I have sat and talked with friends and family who are going through things at work. Not every situation is the same, but there is a difference between hard times and not being valued. Make sure that you know the difference and that you are willing to take the next step. Even though...

It has been about 9 months now since I first started learning to be a ruby developer. 9 months is young. But I am not exactly a total beginner anymore. There are plenty of things that I just don’t know, and of course so much to learn. But I have grown up a little since the days of last fall.

All this learning and growing is starting to pay off. And with these lessons is coming my Web Dev adolescence. I am not quite there yet, but I am definitely facing pre-teen angst right now.I noticed it first when I keep looking for new resources, and found myself doing beginner tutorials again and again. It started to become apparent when I realized that I knew some of the answers on stack overflow, and was annoyed to not find the more in depth explanation that I really need. Now I can see it in my struggle to make large leaps in my knowledge as I go into new territories.

I am approaching that...

DevOps per wikipedia: a software development process that stresses communication, collaboration, integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals.

I didn’t know that this was a thing until I got a job.

Apparently, this is a newer concept and one of those things that is still being defined as it is being applied. Don’t you love things like that? It makes me feel that it is a lot easier to throw myself into the process since no one is a true “expert” yet.

I think that I might really like it. It forces you to understand the process. It is holistic. It involves ever part of the product, and also has to deal with the business end. These are all my strengths.

The short story is that due to cloud computing, you can now create and infrastructure for building and releasing products through scripting and...

A grandiose statement, I will admit. There is also a book written about the subject (see above), so these are not just my words. Although, I am finding that lately I am circling back to the way I used to be, way, way back then. And that got me thinking…

Are we all just trying to get back to the certainty that we had as little kids?

Maybe this is partly my psych degree talking, but the more that I consider the possibility, the more I find a case for it to be true. Being a scientist at heart, it is my habit to constantly question the world around me. I have been in pursuit of trying to determine who I am and what I am here to do since I can remember. But, it was only when I was really, really young did I seem to be the most confident in that answer.

I can remember blatantly saying to people that I would be a doctor, because I wanted to help people. I knew at a really young age that...

As I typed that title, I wasn’t even sure that it meant what I think it means. Regardless of word choice, I am and have been for some time, a careerist. For me this means, that I am focused on taking my talents, skills and dreams and making them into a reality that I live in on the daily. It has been almost my full time job. Due to that focus, it has become one of those things that I can do with my eyes closed.

And that made me think, why aren’t more people doing this?

I don’t think that I am special. I don’t feel like I have a gift for finding and developing careers. Although I often see for others what they can’t see for themselves. When I talk to someone who says,

“I wish that I could be doing something else”

My brain immediately raises to figure out:

“What could they do from where they are? What are their skills, how does that align with what makes them the most happy? How

After working at a real tech job for a few weeks, my husband turns to me and ask,

“So is being a software developer what you thought it would be”?

I took a second to think and replied, “

um, yes and no. But it does feel like I am turning, like a vampire”.

Even though this was my stream of consciousness response, after further thought I realized that becoming a vampire is actually a good analogy of what is happening to me. Now that I have spent a few months as a bonafide software engineer (the junior is silent), I can feel the transformation.

I am not one of those people that knew from a young age that I wanted to do this. And now that I do it, it isn’t the only thing I want to do. It is the thing that I do that makes everything else stronger. So like a vampire, for me, it took some time. I had to let it seep in slowly before I started to feel the affects.

And like a vampire...

The last year has been a life-changing, upside-down feels right side up kind of year for me. But what I have found most interesting as I grow as a developer, is how my internal compass has changed.

Whereas I used to be the Queen of planning, I have now become more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Ironically, I find it hard to plan what I will be doing next week, let alone what my next career move will be. Yet in the midst of all this I am still nagged by this feeling of wanting to know what I should be doing. What is my passion, what is my gift.

In my cursory search of the internet for what I should do next, I discovered that passions and gifts are not exactly the same thing. The big difference is, passion is what fuels you, but a gift is what you offer that fuels someone else. This maybe the reason why you can chase your passions, and still find life fulfilling. So it...

I watched this talk maybe a year ago and it got me thinking. I was already 30, so I was under no illusions about having time to get my life together. But it did make me reflect on how I got to where I am now, and what I want to do next.

I am lucky in that I had already found and married my life mate. I am also lucky that I spent a large chunk of my 20’s pursing (and often failing) certain jobs and careers that I felt were my calling. So that when I got to 31, and had a bad manager who was trying to pin me under her thumb, I knew that this was not what I wanted, and walked out.

But, the thing that I struggle with is knowing that I am doing the right thing, and not freaking out about it. I spent a lot of time in my 20’s lamenting about how I wasn’t partying enough, experiencing enough. Now in my early 30’s, I feel a bit more grounded than some of my friends who had a more active social...

The last few days have been a transition for me. I got a new job opportunity (yay!), and that meant having to drive into the office (boo!).

What it also meant, was that I had to get serious about time management. I enjoy freelancing, and I plan to continue doing it. But now I have a primary commitment to work at a large tech company, and that means prioritization.

My number one priority? Become a better developer. That is partly being taken care of by the fact that my full time work is developing test software. But I don’t want to be defined by a job. I want to be something all my own. And that means continuing to grow on my own, as I had been doing prior to starting this opportunity.

This has required me to set up work nights at home. That means, that these evenings are set aside for me to work at my home office on freelance work, or personal projects. In my effort to build up a...