The long road

It's been quite a long road in my studies so far. Six months ago was when I began learning how to program, and wrote my first script to Secret Santa-ing in Ruby. Three months later, I began working at Animoto as their first Software Engineer intern, taking a chair behind front-end development to refine my skills in html, css, and javascript. After many long days (and to many coming!) I was offered a full time position at Animoto as a front end software engineer. I love my job, and moving to programming and the tech field can easily be suggested as one of the better decisions that's been made in the last few years.

As of now, I don't have much to say about hustling. I'm exhausted, yet in a blissful way, and I think my tech talk from work says it best (beware, it looks like ass in anything but webkit).

Starting in January, we're going to see some changes to the blog that basically got my career rebooted. For one, I'm moving in the direction of data. Thomson Nguyen introduced me to data and R a few weeks ago after my interests moved into the direction of "I want answers for these things," and a handful of coworkers sent data analysis and visualization books to read. The blog content, of course, will now be targeting what I learn over the next year as I hope to make a name for myself this new area of focus. It feels like a good fit--it offers a chance to expose creativity in data manipulation, as well as expressing a passion of data design and modeling. So, I suppose, more on this next year.

Another focus and hope is to move the blog off blogger and over to Wordpress, or rewrite it in more dynamic CMS. This is from a love/hate relationship with blogger. After managing a complete re-haul of the Animoto blog, I'd like to take advantage of what's out there and make something that fits me much more and should (hopefully) be easier to maintain. So, soon we'll be saying goodbye to this monospace font and poor design and trading it in for something more desirable.

Finally, in January, there'll be a four-week feature about computer literacy in public school, including lesson plans that, ideally, would fit best in a classroom that address literacy, like an English classroom. This was something that's been in the back of my mind since I really started getting the hang of reading and writing code, and is a great opportunity for all students to be in a foreign literacy scenario before diving into a traditional text. I'll try to design them around 50-minute classes.

Edit: With the sudden influx of IE users, I'm well aware this blog is incredibly ugly in IE6-8. I'm not going to fuss about this now, but will be fixed with the new blog setup--ideally it will be responsive and ready to take 2012 by storm.