I finally graduated from Thinkful, an online coding bootcamp.

I really learned a lot, and it was thanks in most to my mentor. Unlike many of my colleagues from the program, my mentor was a full stack developer who knew the front to the back of programming. I was lucky!

However, working hard and learning how to program also takes a lot of effort on the student's part. So putting hours in to programming and studying is just as important as communicating with your mentor or going over the curriculum material.

But after joining a bootcamp and finishing, I have to say that the learning is never done.

You cannot just stop studying, coding, building, networking, etc. It's all about making programming a lifestyle.

I'm even planning on ways to get more involved by joining open-source projects, creating collaborative work with colleagues from the program, building my own side-projects to test out new technologies, tutorials, and going through online programs like CS50 and Udacity nanodegrees.

So, don't forget to keep learning, and finding ways to improve yourself. If you want to become something amazing, make sure to give it your all, and don't stop trying!

It's been about 6 months since we've been living in San Jose, California. I'm already starting to forget what it was like living in Tucson, Arizona -- the desert, where we had stayed for about 8 months before moving to slightly sunnier California.

Urban life can sometimes be stuffy. I spend a lot of my time in my small 595 sq. ft. apartment, tending to a few plants in my tiny patio, and if I do go out, walk about 5-10 minutes to Starbucks or 20 minutes to the library across the tiny river.

Today's post is going to be a little more about both my journey towards being a real web developer and my zero waste minimalism life style.

I'm currently on my 6th month in the Thinkful bootcamp. I've been working on a React capstone for the past few weeks. Hopefully I'll be finalizing that project shortly. Still some rough parts to polish, but mostly good for now. Ironically, I'm also freelancing to improve a venture capitalist company's website in Wordpress. The ironic part was that my time in Tucson working irregularly in a design agency helped instill in me my knowledge of using Wordpress. Thankfully, you don't need to know a ton of php in order to word with the editors because most of the code is also basic JavaScript.

So, enough about that nothing too much happening in my career in terms of being more of an established developer. But it's a start.

Now, since moving to this new city. I've been blessed to enjoy foods from many different cultures. I can easily get some of my favorite foods like Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese and Chinese with no problems. Which makes it sometimes hard for me to stay motivated to cook at home.

The bad part about not cooking much at home, is I can easily fall into making waste. Now part of our ZWM lifestyle is to minimalize waste. But we've been still good about carrying around our reusable spoons/napkins, cups and bags, so we're still working on minimalizing. But there are still items we are getting that comes in plastic packaging like noodles or cookies. I'm planning on making a lot more things from scratch. For example, tofu, noodles, breads, etc. I'll make a blog post shortly about that in the following weeks to come.

But one of the things I'm making sure to do better is to remember to enjoy and savor the moments with the ones we care most about. For me that is making sure my family and close friends are healthy and happy, and to stay in touch.

Life isn't a race, we don't have to try to be the best or the most amazing out there, after all life is short and if we don't stop to enjoy the moments we will end up missing out and regretting the awesome stuff.

So breath deep and go slowly.

So, I apparently like to sporadically write about different topics. I hadn't had any good ideas for over a month,  but this one was on my mind this week as I began to really develop a large scale application using React/Redux. I'm working on my third capstone in the Thinkful program.  You can find more about it here.

My previous capstone was mainly using Node/Express, MongoDB, and handlebars, with authentication through PassportJS. I would have to say that definitely moving onto React/Redux and JWT definitely pushes my learning up a notch.

So, the first thing I want to say is how beneficial it has been to learn more about the development process from nearly scratch. I'm using webpack 2, which I've configured myself, and it is definitely something to get used to. But the funny thing is the more I keep messing with the code, the more I actually come to understand it.

I recommend that anyone doing their own project check out some tutorials. I prefer youtube tutorials though because I'm a visual learner, and I like to hear people explain it as they go through the code. However, that's not to say that some materials like written ones with images aren't bad, but they just aren't as effective for my own learning.

I also noticed that while building this capstone, I noticed I'm acquiring more ways to improve how to write my code, and also in setting up my directory. I believe that good clean architecture for your project is important, especially when you're sharing it with others.

So, as of right now I'm not done with my project (it's been over a week since conception to coding), I've discovered a lot more things I need to improve. But I am definitely getting there, and hopefully after this is all over, I will be an even better web developer. 

I went to my first hackathon and this is what I experienced and thought.

I happened about 2 months ago to discover there was a conference happening in SF. It was called Developer Week 2017.

This happened to be my first hackathon as well. I wasn't sure what to expect. It also occurred on a Saturday and Sunday.

I found a team to work on, it was for a door dash like application, but for stadiums. I ended up building the API so the android devs could retrieve the data.

It was a simple node, express, mongodb setup. But I totally felt all these mixture of feelings as I was working on this simple piece of backend code. I read this article before writing this blog, which was helpful for a junior like me.

One of the things that hackathons teaches you is how to work together in a team of strangers, bring together your expertise in order to contribute to the development of the app, and learn to accept that sometimes your work may not be used. Although the ideal would be to work together with a group of people you know well, and on a project that the entire team have a fairly good reason to support. But, that's not always how it turns out.

I think that despite the fact that I've been formally learning for about 4 months now, and have had a year more of self-learning, I have really found myself further ahead in my studies than when I first began. Every little bit of knowledge can be useful in developing my skills as a web developer, from studying SQL that one time, to knowing how a mobile app works.

Most of us junior devs that come from a non-CS background may have a bad case of imposter syndromes. We're not gifted with the opportunity or desire to go through the CS programs because maybe we were not supported in that area, or we did not get the after-school tutoring and good instruction at school for mathematics.

But what this hackathon has taught me was that no one is good at everything. Everyone has their flaws, whether that be in designing, coding, communication or leading a project. No one is perfect, and everyone is learning or at least gaining experience from doing.

Being at the bottom of the totem pole is going to suck for awhile. But one day a lucky opportunity will come and you will work on a great project that will help you build your skills so you can move on to the next level. Then that's when you will realize that all those moments contemplating vague concepts, you will eventually get them, and on top of that figure out the next difficult and abstract problem, to one day become the expert.

For my future self, I hope you didn't give up because each day is a struggle, but when you keep trying and look back, you will realize that you have made progress as long as you continue to try and enjoy what you do.

Recently, I moved to one of the biggest tech city of them all, San Francisco or better yet Silicon Valley. Here is where many of the big name companies that is driving our consumption of media built its name, i.e., Google, Apple and Facebook.

Before coming here I had decided to become a programmer.

In my simple life living in the Midwest, I thought that I knew what a programmer meant, and what kind of job I would end up doing.

Building websites right?

Well, that idea of a simple streamline path to becoming what I thought was a simple to describe job was in fact dashed as I got deeper into the field.

The next thing I know people are talking about "Software Engineer" as prominently as "Computer Scientist"  had been back in 2008 when the technology craze had really hit the ceiling (at least for me).

Now, I'm scratching my head and wondering what the hell is a "Software Engineer" and how is anything different from a Front-End, Web Developer, Back-End....

The one thing I have discovered so far is that the field of computer programming is diverse. There is so many faucets of this infinite field that one day you can be expert Python coder to becoming a ninja at DevOps.

Exposure I think is key to really understanding all these crazy paths that exists in the tech field. If I hadn't read countless articles, watched countless videos, searched millions of job posts, or network at dozens of meetups I would not have an inkling of what these terms even mean.

But I'm slowly getting there, and that's the point.

Everyone's journey towards achieving whatever life goal they aim for starts with climbing and pushing through the muck. There's no easy track and even the best ones out there doing all the speaking at workshops and conferences all began just as everyone had, which was scratching their head...wondering what that first term in programming meant.

Not everyone was born knowing everything. Like Sal Khan says "Everyone Can Learn", and that's the point, we're life-long learners and it's by being persistent every day that we end up truly helps us improve.

Nothing comes easily or quickly, but if I want to become awesome at what I want, I've got to work on it.

So like I learned from my first Write/Speak/Code workshop at Github Headquarters in SF on January 21, 2017, you've got to #OwnYourExpertise!

And I didn't define Software Engineer here...and that's the point of this post :-)

Happy 2017!

Many people must have been glad to see 2016 off, especially with so many traumatic news stories and unpredictable events that has happened...Although 2017 did not start off great for some parts around the world...We still live in some of the most interesting times.

Technology is growing (i.e., self-driving cars, AIs, etc), medicine is much better than it had been, people are living longer, there's no shortage of food, and living standards are getting better.

But we shouldn't forget that we share a planet with many other people. And a lot of folks do not have the same access to the goods many of us living in the developed nations do have.

The world is not separated by borders or blocked off by walls.

The air, land and water are still connected no matter if we contain it into small bottles and sell them off for high prices.

My goal for 2017 is to continue to live a zero waste minimalist lifestyle, where my focus in my life is to find ways to produce less waste and to live with less. Not only do I want to do that in my personal life, but also to make my career in a way focus on this.

As a developer, I want to find ways to build apps that provide a service to those folks that want to find ways to improve their health and lifestyles in order to minimize their exposure to the unnecessary. I'm not sure yet what that looks like, but I believe that like everyone in life, we learn from each other and from our experiences. So only time will tell.

So, for now I look forward to continuing our 7th year together with my husband, enjoy our new city of San Jose, and to continue to reduce our wants and waste so that eventually when we start a family and age we can contribute something good to our planet.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery