After spending weeks fixing errors, I finally have most of the projects that I had been working on up a going again via Railway. And now for the update of what has been going on...

A lot has happened in the past few months since everything had crashed. Life has thrown a few curve balls at me, but it has also found a way to put me back on track to the things that had really mattered to me for a long time. Let's start with work.

    I had taken a step back for a little while from the intensive learning that I had been doing for a while so that I can work on financially related issues, in other words, I got a second job for a little while to help with the increased expenses from all of the prices on everything going up. I had been working with DoorDash for long nights and weekends that it had actively replaced my whole learning schedule that I had establish for a while. After about a year of this I decided that it was time to get back on track. My skill set in .NET was getting rusty and it was time to get it all back. For a short while this meant working at Safe Home during the day, starting up a Dash in the afternoon and evening, and then getting home later in the night and cracking open the books to study and work through some skill building activities. This lasted for about six months before I decided that the best way to reignite the skills that I had built in the past was to get a job focusing in the .NET space once again. I had enjoyed all of the new skills and technologies that I had learned at Safe Home, but it wasn't what I striving to accomplish in my field. So, off to the applications I went and to be honest… it wasn't looking good for a while there. I almost lost hope on this until I finally got a hit on an application that I had submitted. A company called American Nuclear Insurers, aka ANI reached out to me. During the interview process I could feel that this company was going to be a good fit for me. Not only were they a Microsoft shop, but they matched their drive for their team members to learn to my own. From the first interview I had begun pushing to build new projects again as well as to learn more about advanced practices in SQL Server. I was hooked again. I won't bore you with the details of the remainder of the interview process, but I joined up with ANI and made a jump to get back to my learning schedule again.  I started cutting back my time on the road and increasing more time on learning sites building up my skillsets. Since day 1 with ANI, I've pushed my knowledge of SQL Server further than I've been able to and now I am working to build up advanced knowledge of SQL Server best practices. I've even found out that one of the goals that I have had for the past 5 years is now going to be completed and that is to attend Microsoft's Live!360 Conference in Orlando, FL. ANI is sending me down there and I've got to say that I am super excited about this. 

    On the personal projects side, I've finally gotten all of my projects back online, save a couple of them that have had some bigger issues to contend with. One of the specializations that I was pushing myself towards was learning to build out web APIs and so now with the bigger importance of learning SQL Server, I've started spending nights bridging the gaps between the new processes that I've learned in SQL Server with what I know in building APIs. I know that in my new role I won't be building applications for a while, but I still want to keep that knowledge fresh so that when the time comes, I'm good to go. Regardless of the path forward, I do continue to work on my React skillset as well because I know that I can merge my abilities for building .NET webAPIs and merge it with a robust and dynamic React application and frontend. This is a skillset that I want to have because I would still like to do some freelance work on the side and React is still a very popular frontend technology. 

    So that is what I have for now. Unfortunately, when everything went dark, I lost all of my past articles, so I am starting from scratch and trying to make a goal of posting at least once a week and especially during special events like the dev conference coming in November. I hope that you will follow along on my DevLife journey and that you all are able to learn something from this blog as well as enjoy the stories from within it. Thank you for hanging around and I will see you all real soon!