Primarily, this blog is a form of self-accountability.

My name is Rohan. I'm 26 and my current academic status is suspension from Brigham Young University. Not ideal. More importantly, I feel stagnant, and this feeling has been growing for the past couple of years. My major is Middle Eastern Studies and while I find the content interesting, parts of me feel like I haven't taken advantage of the opportunities a university education can provide in terms of gaining hard skills. I took a couple of coding classes as a Junior but was already too far along in my degree to switch majors. After returning to my major classes I struggled and COVID was the nail in the coffin. I failed to engage in my education through an online medium. I failed multiple classes, and as we transitioned back to in-person learning I never regained my footing.

I've been working in the construction world for the past two years building sunrooms and now retaining walls. I'm grateful to have worked outdoors and seen firsthand the fruits of my labors on a daily basis. At the end of the day, I still feel a gnawing in the back of my head for more. I've let life come to me rather than being purposeful in my decisions and deciding what I will do with my life. This is my journey to learning to code and more importantly to finding purpose and self-fulfillment.

Today I am in Trussville, Alabama visiting my parents for Christmas. I haven't jumped into any code yet, but I've read a couple of articles and am looking to create a system that I can stick to. A lot of this motivation comes from recently reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. Hopefully, this blog will highlight the small changes I am looking to make in my life that will aggregate into large changes.

To start my coding journey I googled "self taught coding" and came across this blog post: The Self-Taught Developer's Guide to Learning How to Code by Linda Ikechukwu. This led me to choose the Niche of Cyber Security and led me to the Hashnode community where I can keep this blog. I picked Cyber Security after googling high-paying coding jobs and reading about some of the options.

Finally, I decided to focus my learning by using UDEMY to find a specific course that I could follow. I picked "The Complete Cyber Security Course : Hackers Exposed!" by Nathan House.

Tomorrow, I will start the course after finishing breakfast. We are planning on watching the new Avatar movie as a family in the afternoon, so hopefully I can make some good progress in the morning. Wish me luck!