I love waiting more than a month in between blog posts.

SO much is happening. 

School has started again. It's way too much to do all at once and I'm completely overwhelmed. The school is doing a great job trying to keep everyone safe, but it comes with the cost of the teachers stretching themselves a bit thinner than usual. Which is honestly saying a lot. But, it's gotten slightly easier. It's only my fifth day with kids and I'm doing ok. I'm stressed and worried, but that's normal for the beginning of the year. I know it's more stress and worry than usual, but there's nothing I can do about it. 

As far as coding goes, I'm still working. I've gotten better at ASP.Net and I'm loving the changes I'm making to the website. Right now, it has a database issue. We went from hard coding everything, to making a List of the authors and poems, to now we're trying to make a database but somethings not right about it. I'm nor sure what it is, and neither is Brandon. But, we'll get it working this weekend and I'm sure I'll be on my way. It's very exciting to be doing this, but also I feel like I'm not retaining as much as I'd like to. That's why I'm going back and trying to relearn C# from the ground up to make sure I'm solid on those foundations. I wanna make sure that later on I'm not looking like a complete moron when I need to do something in C#. 

I'm starting a side project with Chloe Condon. We start on it next week, and it's gonna be very challenging, but it's gonna turn poems into emojis. I know there's a ton of emoji from text converters out there, but I came up with this and she said she wouldn't mind collaborating on a project. This is my first collaboration, and I don't know what to expect. I do know that I don't know enough coding to go and make something like this, but I look forward to using this to get better and better. 

I applied to, and have been invited to, speak at a Microsoft conference called Start.Dev.Change.  Which is insane; I have no business being in front of people at a large conference like that. But I will. I'm going to speak about how important it is to be confused, and that the confusion we experience is a big part of how we learn. It's a bit ironic that the talk will be all about overcoming confusion and I am just perpetually confused. Either way, it'd be cool if you watched my speech AND the panel that I'll be on that is made up of people from non traditional tech backgrounds at different points in the career switching process. I'm really stoked to speak at the conference and to see where this takes me. 

This is just filler right now, and that's fine. I'm gonna try to use this more often, but it's hard to build this habit correctly when school and band and everything is just so convoluted and hard to do right now.