I quit my job. Wow, still looks crazy and scary to see it in writing! After working in the Information Technology for the last 12 years, I have decided to finally jump into the programming world.

It took over a year of planning to save, fully commit, and provide my company a full transition for after my departure. When I joined the Learn program with Flatiron School I had initially planned on completing the course part time, in the evenings, after work. I started very strong completing the Intro Ruby course and was accepted into the full program. Unfortunately, about this time, work started to pick up and new projects landed in my plate. These projects were very exciting but left me with little to no time to dedicate to code. Little by little I started coding less and eventually completely neglected my web development coursework. As I worked through my employment responsibilities, the desire to get back to coding lingered in my mind. Throughout the lifecyle of my IT projects, I started thinking of the possibility of completely quitting my job and dedicating myself full time to the Learn coursework. At first I thought it was just a crazy idea! Why would I leave a very successful career and go back to being student. The more I thought about it and started planning and saving, the more it seemed completely feasible. When I was in high school and college, I had always excelled in any programming classes I had taken. It just so happened that when I jumped into the workforce, I landed a great IT career path in the computer hardware systems and networking world. I always wondered what it would have been like if I had gone into the software systems world. Here was my chance to change industries and I needed to see it through. The software development world, in my opinion, is the way of the future. More and more IT systems are becoming extremely automated and redundant. The need for IT professionals appears to be declining and most companies are moving away from hiring internal staff to manage their systems and user needs. IT has also also, in many cases, become a thankless job where top level executives sadly see it as a non-revenue generating department. At many times, companies outsource IT support to managed service providers. I luckily had worked as internal staff for the last 5 years, helping my organization scale to business growth, deploying countless systems, and managing a growing amount of users needs. Even with this, I felt that staying in this industry could pose issues for me in the future. Toward the last few years I began to feel that I was just supporting systems and users. With limited staff and resources, I felt I no longer had any time to learn or expand my professional education. I really was not learning or growing and felt I had reached a plateau. I decided I needed to do something about it.

As of mid November, I stopped my employement and have jumped full time into learning web development. My goal is to complete the coursework toward the end of March 2017. I am documenting this to remind and push myself to this goal. I plan on documenting my journey, struggles, and learnings throughout my course work.

Thank you Flatiron School for giving me the opportunity to learn and create!

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