A Year of Firsts

Welcome to my new look! I’ve just spent the last few hours messing around with my website design, building new pages, and making this look (a bit) more like I had originally envisioned it.

Tip: if you only read this in your email, just visit yearoffirsts.blog and you should see what I mean.

I have never done much web development. At one job where literally no one on my staff knew how to edit a website, I gritted my teeth and taught myself *just* enough HTML to make the tiny changes I wanted. But that’s been about the beginning and end of my web development journey in life – until now.

I’ve always much preferred telling someone who has taken the proper courses and has the right experience what I want, and then paying them to make it a reality. Of course in those instances I was working at a company that had a budget for such things. This is all me!

I still haven’t quite gotten everything exactly where I want it, and I’m struggling with being a beginner but wanting to customize things at an expert level. I’ve watched a few tutorials, got bored of that and had some fun with trial and error, and then just decided to stop sacrificing the good for a perfect that isn’t going to happen today.

I’m contrasting this feeling of frustration with a moment of joy I had yesterday sharing my expertise with someone. I was in a class where the teacher was clearly a people person, and not a tech person. She knew her subject backwards and forwards, but operating the powerpoint and various other softwares and hardwares was just not her forte. In a moment of absolute surrender she just stopped struggling and said, “Is anyone in here good with technology?” and I made my way to her desk to help her out.

There were some things I was familiar with and some things I wasn’t, but I managed to walk through her software and figure out where she had gone wrong, back her up, and point her in the right direction. While I was at it I stopped her from printing 25 pages of content, changed her printer cartridge, and helped her set up the Presenter View in her PowerPoint presentation.

I felt like a total badass even though it was no big deal, but I know navigating these simple things are hard for a non-tech person, and even harder when you’re already flustered.

Sometimes it’s awesome to feel like an expert; to have someone lavish you with compliments for the thing that feels second nature because you did all that deep learning years ago.

And sometimes being a beginner is just where we need to live for a while. Sometimes playing in that sandbox is pure joy. Other times, I feel so annoyed because I know how much time and effort it’s going to take me to get good at a thing, and I’m not sure if I want to spend my one wild, precious life learning how to code. And sometimes we have to admit we’ll never finish those hours of practice we need to be amazing at a skill, and instead learn to accept that that is OK.

I’m not always up for learning new skills these days if they take more time than I’m willing to give, but this was fun, if a bit humbling. I realized that I had made lots of mistakes in my original set up that I now had to take extra time to fix, and I had to admit that I really did not understand most of the new terms I encountered. But after a few hours, I’ve made some significant progress, and learned a few lessons, so I think I’ll be back to make more changes at some point in the near future.

Enjoy the new layout. Let me know what you like or don’t like! I can’t promise that I’ll fix it, but it’s fun to pretend I can.