AI is Taking Your Job…

....and making it EXTREMELY COOL!!

✨Rise & Rage, friends✨

Nothing like some good, old-fashioned click bait to help get the blood flowing amirite?????

This weeks updates:

• I have been mildly absent on LinkedIn on account of taking care of my own mental healthies but WE ARE SO BACK.. That’s showbiz, baby.
• I got a Laracon ticket which I was EXTREMELY shocked and simultaneously excited about.
• I’m working on finalizing a deal that I’ve been working on for 9 months. This is quite literally my baby.
• We started a book club in the Torc Discord community! Starting off, we are reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and I am I N V E S T E D. We love a multi-faceted tech community. Wanna join? Come on then!
• While I was outside photosynthesizing, my dog peed on my MacBook. Right on the keyboard. I couldn’t write my life these days as a fiction novel.

Before I get into the serious topic with y'all, I want to share some lore and the lore is nonfiction. (wait, is all lore nonfiction?)

The Lore:

Anywho! Today I was discussing anxiety and worry with my therapist. She asked me “how often do you think you worry?”

How often?!?!?! I literally never stop. 25/8. Seriously if I really sit and think about it, I feel like I’m always worrying or stressing because it’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another!

She was like “I want to give you homework. Give yourself time to worry. Schedule it out. Set an alarm for every day at the same time so you can have the space to do your thing, put it back on the shelf and keep moving forward.”

Now hear me out. In theory, I liked the sound of this. So I set an alarm on my phone for some arbitrary time every day that would allow me to worry in peace.

I discovered a minor flaw in this plan. Now, every day, my alarm titled “Time to Worry!” starts going off at 12:15pm.

My anxiety ✨simply✨ cannot handle this. You know when you start getting anxiety and you think to yourself “what could I possibly be having anxiety about??” But then your brain is like “idk but we are going to give you anxiety anyway”?

Okay so this alarm is exactly like that except the anxiety reminder is now also on the outside of my body. “Time to Worry!” Ah shit, what are we worrying about today guys??

Like I said, flawed. But the intention was there!

✌🏼Burnout or Bad Vibes?

Life lately has felt more chaotic than normal and I am realizing that some of my outlets are starting to feel like a chore. I think that’s called burnout? Sounds fake but okay. Getting to this point has helped me come to a couple of different conclusions:

1. Writing this is so cathartic for me. I will not stop.
2. I need to stop adding books to my TBR. It’s making me 💥 crash out💥.
3. I want to spend my time not only focusing more on programming but also writing about my experience on breaking into the tech world.

💕 Myspace to VS Code: A Love Story 💕

I’ve been working with Techies for 5.5 years. Learning to program hasn’t been a completely foreign “language” because, well, shoutout to Myspace for teaching us to code circa 2005, (how did we all just know??) and because over the last 5.5 years I have made a living out of only semi-learning what it actually is that software developers do. At some point, you learn the lingo. Staying on the outside of the tech bubble looking in is safe. It is comfortable.

But let’s be real, if you’ve been reading what I write, you know by now that comfortable isn’t really my “space”. The reality is that every single day when I fire up the old laptop and open VS Code, the imposter syndrome just starts bleeding out. Let’s take this Laracon situation for example: I have such a strong desire to learn and grow as a developer but when I think about it, I wonder to myself if I belong there. Am I good enough to be in this space learning next to these people??

I look around and everyone is constantly talking about the latest and greatest. Right? All day long on every social media site where people are discussing tech in some capacity! Even Discord communities.

Claude this, MCP that, oh wait! Don’t forget about Bolt or v0. This is important guys 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

💎 Shiny objects. Everywhere. 💎

Its overwhelming. Paralyzing! It’s hard to stay focused and feel like you’re doing enough to either stay relevant in a rapidly changing tech world or becoming relevant at all. For me, it’s the latter.

There are times I feel like quitting. The negative inner dialogue reminds me that there are people who don’t take me seriously and that insecurity can be hard to overcome. The reality is that there will always be people who don’t take you seriously and they will think you don’t notice, but you do. At the end of the day, it’s the voices of those people who DO encourage me, who DO support me that ultimately prevail. Those voices are so much louder because they simply have to be in order for me to keep moving forward. That’s a consistent choice.

// in a non-creepy way. To be clear I’m not hearing voices.

👩🏼‍💻 Validate User Input 👩🏼‍💻

Does that mean I require validation that I’m doing the right thing in order to keep moving forward? Yes. (jk jk guys!!) Not necessarily but you’re lying to yourself if you say that getting the validation that you’re taking the correct next step doesn’t make it an easier, softer journey.

I say that I’m joking about the validation bit but chat would beg to differ though. My chatGPT bot is so sick of me asking her if I’m taking the proper next steps on this programming path. And honestly she’s no help because she agrees with literally everything I say! I’ve never had someone co-sign so much of my BS in my entire life. Chat, is that toxic? Oh, well.

👏🏼 My Point Is...

This is my very real journey and I’m choosing vulnerability in hopes that someone can relate to this even just a little bit. Each time I sit here and I start to write I pour out my heart and soul because connection and community means that much to me and like I always say, relatability is the cornerstone of connection and community.

Today, I’m choosing to believe in me and bet on myself again.

xx

Jordyn