A Year Ago Today

A year ago today, I pushed up my first commits to win-deck. It's not my oldest commit on Github; that honor goes to Mini-Paint. I barely knew how to use Git back then. If memory serves me, I even copy and pasted some of the code directly into the edit window on Github.com. Win-deck was a hacky little mod of Zurb's orbit.jQuery. Zurb doesn't even support it anymore (and didn't last May 9th, either, but it was simple and fit my needs.)

Why did I build this little thing? I had heard on Twitter that HaikuDeck was hiring web developers. I knew some Javascript and HTML and thought I'd apply for a Junior Dev position. The application process included creating a HaikuDeck demonstrating why you're awesome and should come work for them. The hitch: at the time, HaikuDeck didn't work on Windows. With the exception of my ancient, missing-half-its-keys G4, all I had to work with was Windows. So, I hacked together my own little version of a HaikuDeck, using that old deprecated version of orbit.jQuery. (Thank you, Zurb!)

Needless to say (so why say it?), HaikuDeck didn't hire me. I did get a very nice rejection response email (which speaks volumes about how awesome HaikuDeck is as a company and served to make me want to work with them even more!)

I didn't want to admit it at the time, but the rejection broke my spirit for a long while. You can see it in my Github graph, and in my activity charts on Codecademy, my then-primary learning platform. Slowly, I built myself back up to keep trying.

Those 4 commits have remained on my Github graph for, well, a year now. They've been a reminder to not let rejection crush me again. Every time I visit Github, that giant block of grey that follows them stares back at me, reprimanding me for all those lost chances to create something.

Those two green boxes from May, 2013 are about to fall off my chart. I will be left with 21 weeks of empty squares.

I know this is the last time I'll have such a swath of blanks on my chart. The green squares pick up again in October when I started to work through the public portions of the Ada Developers Academy curriculum. And with a few dips here and there (most notably during the Retail Hell Month of December), nearly every week has at least a few commits.

And it's only going to get better from here. My internship with Wikimedia officially starts in just over a week. I can't wait to see where this path goes. I guess we'll find out together.