I have been going at almost top speed since the beginning of March and I’ve finally let off the throttle just enough to realize I have not documented my cool things as much as I would like. Being ambitious means that any free time I have is either spent moving forward or resting. I haven’t given myself the chance to stop and check things out, so I’m forcing myself to do that now. The main reason I started my website was to chronicle my achievements and issues as I work towards becoming a software developer. Unfortunately the last blog post I wrote unrelated to Colorado Tech Weekly was… Holy crap! It was in February! It’s June now!!

So where the hell have I been lately? I have been All Over The Place, Stressed, Lost, Excited, Stressed and in South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado. I have passed 2 classes, accidentally co-founded a business, become skeptical of my interest in web development and have considered game development.

In March I took a Data Structures course and an Ethics in IT course at Regis University. I soon learned that the further advanced I get in my degree, the harder classes become so March and April were very difficult months. All my free time ended up being devoted to coursework and even some of my not-free time. March also includes my wife’s birthday, my birthday and we had planned a trip to South Dakota for spring break which was awesome. I was juggling too many things but thanks to my understanding family I was able to juggle them fairly well.

I thought April was going to be easier. I had less family events, but my coursework got progressively harder. To make matters worse, I had decided to drop everything for a weekend and participate in the Go Code Colorado Challenge in Denver. It was, and is, a great experience, but it is a lot more involved than I realized. I plan on writing extensively about my Go Code Colorado experience in a different set of posts. For now I’ll just say that it’s way more than a hackathon, the challenge goals are very ambitions and it’s a lot more work when you win. It was a lot of work for my team and still is, because we won!

By the end of April I passed both my classes (I got an A in Data Structures and B in Ethics), helped my team become one of the Denver Go Code Colorado winners, and somehow stayed in my family’s good graces enough that they still like having me around. My wife and daughter are very forgiving.

Taking classes part-time online means never having to say “I have nothing to do” so after having the first week off in May I started my Computation Theory course which I’m really enjoying. The month of May also included end of school year events for my daughter, my first ever Denver Comic Con (more on that in another post) and being declared a winner of the Go Code Colorado Challenge!

Lately I’ve had the idea of diving into C# so I can learn the .NET stack of web development and so I can give Unity a try to scratch my game development itch. I love the storytelling that goes along with game development and, since I would like to write a book one day, game development sounds awesome in that regards. In fact, the IGDA is curating a  WAG (Write A Game) Challenge that ends at the end of June that looks really cool.

So all I want to do, right now, is continue to learn Javascript and Meteor for MentorMatter (my accidentally co-founded company from the Go Code Colorado Challenge), learn C# so I can learn .NET and Unity, learn to write compelling stories for novels and games, get another A in a class at Regis, keep my blog updated, continue working my 40 hour/week job, keep my house clean, keep my yard not-horrible and spend time with my wife and daughter because everything I do is for them.

I think I need to learn how to prioritize better. 🙂