Work soft play soft

The theme of this sabbatical is gentleness: self-compassion, slow and deliberate communication, patience. Allowing time for conscious awareness to seep into the subconscious and let cognitive dissonance evaporate. Through regular meditation, therapy, and the support of loved ones, I’ve been cultivating the practice of meeting both intensity and uncertainty with gentleness. This has required intentionally […]

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Age of sabbath

Decided to return to this blog and expand its purpose to serve as a space for life journey reflections beyond just career related adventures. I started this blog when I embarked on the path of software development with a desire to track and share my learnings with others curious about a similar journey. I’m back […]

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Ruby For Good

Just returned from Ruby For Good, a DC-area conference where Rubyists gather to work on projects for non-profits. The location was the Smithsonian Biology Institute, nestled in the foothills of Shenandoah Valley. The conservation school aims to care for and breed threatened species with hopes of eventually releasing them back into the wild. Our group’s […]

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The Iron Yard – Week 4

This week was a hard-learned lesson in relationships and communication. We continued to explore SQL relational databases with Active Record. I felt frustrated and discouraged after not being able to complete Monday’s homework. For some reason, I was having a difficult time grasping how exactly one table in a database in associated with another and how […]

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The Iron Yard – Week 3

We started off this week by launching into the deep dark Interwebs from our command lines via HTTP requests, the internet’s persnickety messenger pigeons. We were also introduced to Sinatra, a lightweight open source framework for building web applications. I encountered Sinatra again at Code for Durham’s Day of Civic Hacking.  I worked with the group developing Citygram, a way to […]

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The Iron Yard – Week 2

Another Classy week down at TIY. After more refactoring practice, we learned how to use classes to group methods with similar attributes together. For homework, we built a program to parse data transactions from a store and write functions to do some basic statistical analyses. It was the first time I had a taste of […]

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The Iron Yard – Week 1

We’ve made it though Week 1 at The Iron Yard’s Ruby on Rails back end engineering bootcamp! In the past week I’ve learned about as much as I did during 4 months of slogging through online tutorials on my own. We’ve covered most of Ruby’s basic object class types, data structures, and how to use methods […]

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