"It's Not About the Pasta."

On hard pivots, hating JavaScript, and needing your voice back.

If you've been quietly performing as a version of yourself that stopped being true a long time ago, exhausted from pretending the fit is fine when it clearly isn't, I really get it.

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Guys, we are skipping dinner and going for the dessert.

I love pasta. Big pasta gal. Don't care how it's made and I certainly don't speak Italian. Are you picking up what I'm putting down?

But here's the thing: this blog isn't about pasta. It's about tech.

And these are my feelings on the tech industry. I love it. I am obsessed with it. I want to be in the room where it's happening, I want to understand how it works, I want to be part of the progression... I just don't need to be the one making it from scratch. Here's the deal: it took me longer than I'd like to admit and figure out that those are two completely different things, and only one of them is actually mine.

When I started creating, and not finishing, my first app (s/o v0, truly) I had a realization that about took me OUT: actually writing code is a pretty small percentage of the software development equation. Y'all I do not.. I repeat, DO NOT, like writing code. I am detail-oriented, I want to know how things work, I want to be close to the build, I want to know the hot goss. But the language itself? Not mine. What's that saying? "don't hate the game, hate the coding language".. or whatever. I realized that having a distaste for the syntax doesn't mean you don't belong in the industry. It means you need to find your sauce.

I love pasta. I don't speak Italian. And I am eating well. Stay with me.

💻 The Birth of LTTO

A year ago, I started this platform with one very clear intention: document my journey into software development. Talk about the grind. Share the wins. Be a person who codes.

And then I sat behind this keyboard, typed my actual thoughts and feelings, and put them fully on display, meanwhile, a shift was taking place. If you've been here from the beginning, you already know I haven't written a single line of code since I injected it into this very site. You know how long ago that was. Yikes.

That was a hard pivot. Real? yes. Important? also yes.

Now, can we just normalize that for a second? Getting genuinely excited about learning something new, sitting with it long enough to realize you hate JavaScript, and deciding to follow your gut instead of white-knuckling through it?

Oddly specific, I know. But let's be real.. Learning to code in the AI era? Pls relax.

But WHY aren't we talking about this? Glad you asked.

Here's the thing: the pivot itself isn't actually the hard part. The hard part is letting people actually see it. The second you change direction, someone's going to clock the gap between what you said you were going to do and what you actually did. I think most people would rather stay miserable in the wrong lane than give anyone that ammunition.

I'm not most people. (lovingly)

I also didn't pivot just because I hated JavaScript. Life has a way of lifing. It sneaks up on you and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I looked up and realized I was showing up for something that wasn't showing up for me. The thing that was supposed to fuel me had quietly turned into a chore.

That's not a small thing to sit with. It's one thing to pivot because something isn't interesting. It's another to admit that a version of yourself you worked hard to build just... stopped fitting.

🛑 Let's get VERY real

What nobody warned me about is how gradual it is losing yourself while trying to be something you're not. It doesn't happen all at once. It happens in small, quiet concessions. You start speaking in a language that isn't yours. You shrink the parts of you that are too loud, too much, too you for the room you're trying to fit into. One day you look in the sleeping macbook screen and you don't totally recognize the person staring back, because you've been so busy performing a version of yourself that you forgot to actually BE yourself.

That's the real cost of staying somewhere you've outgrown. It's not just time. It's identity. It's the slow erosion of the thing that makes you who you are and the terrifying realization that you have to go find it again.

I needed my voice back. I kept showing up anyway.

Here's what I didn't do: disappear. Even after I'd quietly decided that the coding thing wasn't my path, I kept showing up to the conferences. I kept walking into those rooms. Not because I had it figured out but because something in me knew that the community still mattered, even if my reason for being in it was changing underneath me.

What I found when I stopped trying to show up as a baby dev and just showed up as Jordyn was kind of everything. The conversations got easier and the connections got realer. I wasn't performing fluency I didn't have or nodding along to things I didn't care about. I was just a person in a room, genuinely curious, genuinely present and it turned out that was enough. More than enough, actually. That's when the community started feeling like home.

Turns out the rooms were never the problem. The costume was.

📝 What I actually did

So I did the thing that made the most sense and the least sense at the same time. I leaned into the part that always came naturally.. The writing, the community, the ability to walk into a room full of strangers at a conference and leave with real relationships. I turned that into a career in human connection and strategic partnerships. I built Let's Take This Offline into something that's actually mine and I'm proud of that.

And I stopped apologizing for the detour.

Because here's what I know now: changing your mind isn't quitting. Staying somewhere that's slowly erasing you is the real loss. The pivot wasn't a failure. The pivot was the information I needed to finally move in the right direction.

If you've been quietly performing a version of yourself that stopped being true a long time ago, exhausted from pretending the fit is fine when it clearly isn't, I really get it.

You don't owe anyone a consistent storyline. You owe yourself an honest one.

Change your mind, make the move and let people watch.

The best pivots look like chaos from the outside and clarity from the inside.

xx - Jordyn