I was a good mom this morning, so I’m going to be an okay academic this afternoon.

Today’s #100DaysOfCode progress: continued the Applied Accessibility challenges at freeCodeCamp.

Today’s #100DaysOfCode progress: finished freeCodeCamp’s Applied Visual Design, started Applied Accessibility.

Just spent almost 2 hours correcting an AI transcript of a 47 minute interview. This is about 1/3 of the time it would have taken me to transcribe it on my own. And yet I’m worn out from it anyway. My current rate of productivity is 1 major research task per day.

Today’s bio update: replaced “Mom & Scholar-Librarian” with “Mom. Learner. Infomancer. Editrix. Webhead.”

Today’s #100DaysOfCode progress: started freeCodeCamp’s Applied Visual Design challenges. Too headachey/tired to reflect much now, but happy with my progress.

Today’s #100DaysOfCode Progress:

I completed all of the Basic CSS challenges at freeCodeCamp.

I’ve started compiling a list of organizations for women in coding, with a special focus on moms who code.

I started listening to Command Line Heroes. Their latest episode is about the Dreamcast, which made it really easy for me to get interested. I like the style of the show. It’s that kind of high quality reported podcast that brings me joy. Like if The Double Shift were about technology.

For the past couple of years, I’ve felt like I was having a Hashimoto’s thyroiditis flare. But aside from a small dip in my thyroid hormones which was easily corrected by L-tyrosine and iodine supplementation, there hasn’t been any evidence that that’s what was making me feel like garbage. When I asked my doctor about it, almost a year ago I think, she said that maybe it was a food sensitivity or a new autoimmune disease, and asked me to track my symptoms and things that might be triggering them. That tracking got very overwhelming, very quickly, because I was trying to track food and sleep and and and.

I’ve been feeling even more flarey recently, especially since I started sheltering in place, and the other day had extra terrible pain. I’ve also had laughably frequent urination, like, more frequent than when I was pregnant, and in the past I thought maybe that was a sign of diabetes but I wasn’t diabetic. So I started Googling around and discovered that frequent urination can be a symptom of fibromyalgia. (Hi yeah if you don’t believe fibromyalgia is a thing, kindly see yourself away from my comments/replies, because I don’t want to hear it.)

My doctor is also my sister’s doctor, and told her a while back that she probably had fibromyalgia.

So I started talking to my sister about it and researching more. A while back I installed a sleep app on my phone to track my sleep, and it showed that even when I was “asleep,” my movements and breathing indicated that my brain activity was similar to that of an awake person and that I was only getting about 15 minutes of deep sleep on a given night, even if I slept for 7+ hours. My kid only wakes me up maybe once a night anymore, and sometimes not even that, so this isn’t a parent thing. Guess what that sort of sleep pattern is a symptom of?

Did you guess fibromyalgia?

It’s fibromyalgia.

Now is a terrible time to try and get a new diagnosis of a chronic illness if you don’t need pharmaceuticals for it, so I’m not pursuing one right now, even though I’ve got a bit of a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend “A Diagnosis” vibe:

The main thing that is valuable about focusing on treating fibromyalgia over autoimmune stuff is that the books I trust for autoimmune focus on food first, but I’ve been so exhausted I can’t even deal with food prep most of the time. Which, guess what? Is a problem a lot of people with fibromyalgia have. The autoimmune protocol I have has four steps: 1. Food 2. Stress and rest 3. Digestion 4. Detox. Whereas the fibromyalgia one from the book my sister recommended has four similar steps but in a different order: 1. Rest (Stress included) 2. Repair (Digestion + Food combined) 3. Restore (I think this might be the detox one, not sure yet?) 4. Reduce (taking care of lingering symptoms). This re-ordering of things is a revelation for me. Of course if I am not sleeping I don’t have energy to meal plan and shop and cook. OF COURSE.

I feel silly writing it all out, but whatever.

Anyway, I’m acting like a person who’s trying to do as much for her fibromyalgia as she can on her own. First thing, biofeedback via Hearthmath.

Today’s #100DaysOfCode progress:

I completed all of the “Basic HTML and HTML5” challenges at freeCodeCamp.

I also read/watched the following:

• How I got my first developer job at age 40 after 10 months of hard work
• The tools and resources that landed me a front-end developer job
• Join the #100DaysOfCode
• How to Get a Developer Job in Less Than a Year
• 100 Days Of Code - The Rules #100DaysOfCode - YouTube
• Learning to Code: When It Gets Dark

I forked the 100 Days of Code repository to make my own 100 Days of Code Log.

I also set up a Dev page in Notion, with subpages to track goals, deadlines, schedules, a reading list, tools and resources, and notes about things I always forget. (Like how to do forms in HTML5. Because I’m very old-fashioned and not used to it being so straightforward.)

But Kimberly, why are you doing this now? Aren’t you getting a PhD in cosplay or something?

I’m getting a PhD in Library and Information Science. Knowing how to code has rarely made anyone’s life worse.

But one of the main reasons is that, though I’ve been developing websites for about 25 years, I have almost never made money off of it. Which is kind of ridiculous, when you think about who gets paid what for what. It occurred to me that perhaps my potentially lucrative hobby might be a thing that could make me money.

And why I’m doing it right now, is that yesterday I started watching the BeyondProf webinar, “3 Things You Should Do Now to Maintain Momentum in Your Job Search.” BeyondProf is always putting out great stuff and this is no exception. Maren got real about what higher ed might look like in terms of hiring in the near future. And sure, the likelihood of getting a tenure track has been tiny for years.

But until recently, alt-ac seemed like a very good option. A preferable option, even, in my case maybe.

And in this webinar, Maren confirmed what I began to suspect when I heard about hiring freezes at local institutions: that Plan B (or, again, in my case, probably Plan A) well is about to dry up. She talked about having to take odd jobs while you figure stuff out.

And I asked myself in what industry I could be content taking an entry-level position at age 40, with a PhD in LIS and 9 years of experience in education, aside from the cough number of years I’ve spent in grad school. (When I graduate, it will be 9. I will have spent half of my post-grad time in full-time work, and half of it in full-time school.)

The answer was immediately apparent: tech. The nice thing, too, about gaining web development skills is that it doesn’t actually chain you to the tech industry. Lots of library vendors, socially conscious businesses, and non-profits need web developers. And pay them better than they pay librarians. (I know money shouldn’t be a thing or whatever but I have a lot of loans and health care expenses and a 30+ year old house that needs maintaining, so. Also, hi there, we live in late stage capitalism, it means we need money to survive.)

Anyway.

My goal is to have all the skills needed to be a full stack developer by the time I graduate in May 2021, so that if necessary, I’ll have my pick of front end, back end, and full stack jobs.

My deadline for some kind of employment is November 2021, when my student loan deferment grace period will end.

Is it ambitious? Yes, but I’m not starting from scratch.

Having another go at #100DaysofCode, because nobody ever said, “I sure wish my employee didn’t know how to code.”