I got a job!

I graduated from Woz U today. There was a small ceremony in the big room, they called our names one at a time and a guy at the school took pictures of everyone holding their certificate. My mom came out for it and I was glad to see her. The whole class got lunch at a restaurant after and Loki got his own burger out of it.

Demo day for the final project was yesterday. We built a full stack app called Evently, an event tracker that we pitched as a service for city websites. The idea is a city puts it on their site and a visitor tells it their budget, their date range, and what part of town they're in, and it builds them an itinerary of events instead of making them dig through a calendar. Mongo, Express, Angular, Node. We seeded it with a few hundred fake events and it worked in the demo on the second try, the first try died because the database connection string was still pointing at my machine. I fixed it in front of everyone and fixing it live felt better than the demo itself. A couple of the guests from local business in Phoenix asked questions like it was a real product, and I was answering like it was one too, talking about how cities would pay per month for it. It was a lot of fun and I finally feel like I'm good at something.

The bigger news is I accepted a job this week. Contract front end work through Aquent, placed with John Deere out in Illinois. I don’t even know where this email came from because I don’t remember applying for this job. They said there is a 6 week modern web development training so they can teach me how John Deere writes React. Web development finally feels like something I know instead of something I'm learning. The React stuff at night ended up making Angular make more sense, and once components clicked it started feeling like all these frameworks are mostly the same thing wearing different clothes. People keep telling me the first dev job is a huge learning curve and I get it, but I feel ready in a way I haven't felt about anything in a while. I knew things were going to get better. I start Monday morning. I have to leave Loki here for two weeks with one of the school employees who offers to watch him for me. I don’t have a way to get Loki to Illinois yet and the airlines won’t put him under the deck in this heat, not like I’d ever let that happen.