Don't have a snappy title this week.

I've had a lot of successes in my job search over the last week or two, with some promising leads upcoming. But I'm also dealing with several things in my personal life that are making things challenging. The job search isn't easy, and sometimes life comes knocking at your door with loved ones in need and ailing pets. This post will be rambly and unorganized, I'm certain.

I don't have the time or the energy to write an interesting breakdown of an algorithm, or a look at a feature of a language (though if I did, I think I would dive into Binary Search Trees. They're interesting and I'm not as solid on them as I'd like to be. Stay tuned, I guess!). This week my tech blog is more about endurance. I keep hearing over and over, the first job as a software engineer is the hardest to land. After that, you're set. I sure hope that's true. Because right now, I just feel overloaded. Money stress. Constant rejection. Mental health - my own and my partner's. Pet health (we may be saying goodbye to our cat soon). It all adds up.

But you know what? I'm gonna make it. I'm smart. I'm fast. I'm dedicated. At every turn, through my bootcamp itself and in every assessment I've taken since, people have said great things about me. I'm apparently pretty stellar at JavaScript! I took a coding assessment for a potential employer, and I totally aced it. It was a timed assessment full of mostly multiple choice questions and small coding windows, and I felt, so-so about it at the time. Nothing too intimidating in it, it was all topics I had either had covered in class, such as OOP fundamentals, DOM manipulation, conditionals, state management, etc., or had since researched on my own. Debriefing with the recruiter, though, I found out I'd done amazingly well! She told me that the score I achieved was more in line with something she'd expect to see from a mid-level engineer.

I'm going to have to let the world be my mirror. My job hunt coach keeps saying he's not worried at all. So let's keep up the optimism.

I learned so much over those 15 weeks at Flatiron. I refuse to discount that. I've come far, and I'm soaring on further. I've got a phone screen, a tech assessment, and an onsite over the next two weeks. I want to review backend structures, runtime calculations, and some object oriented programming fundamentals. Time to hit the books.