I’m starting a new job on Monday, and have had the luxury of ~10 days off since leaving Cleo. The past 12 months have been unbelievably stressful in my own life, even before taking into account living through a pandemic, and now a war in Europe.

I stand with Ukraine 🇺🇦 💙 💛, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the unfolding situation. If you have the means, consider donating to Unicef or The Red Cross

To avoid complete overwhelm, I took the opportunity to read, wind down, and really think about what I want to achieve in my first few months in my next job.

I spent a lot of time doing katas at the start of the year but have let the practice drop as life got a bit hectic.

I sat down today to do some practice katas for an interview prep group, and thought I’d share the outcome here.

I covered two problems today:

• Persistence

• Reverse Linked List

If you know me then you might already know that I’m a bit advocate for habits over attempting major life overhauls. 2020 was a bit of a strange year, and I spent a lot of the lockdowns resting rather than building the habits I want. But that rest time was much needed, and I now find myself wanting to spend my time being more active, whether than means coding, running, seeing friends or just doing something I enjoy.

I am spending some of my lockdown Christmas following the Teach Yourself CS Curriculum. These are my notes on setting up for the Programming section.

When I started this project I thought I’d be off and away really quickly - learning all the computer science things and revelling in my new found knowledge by Christmas. That is not what has happened 😂 I’ve found the setup required to really follow the suggested course a bit tricky, so I’m making notes here in the hope that it might be of use.

This year has been difficult in so many ways, and like many others in London I’m finishing the year with a final challenge - how to entertain myself over the Christmas period now my plans have been cancelled and I’m home alone 🥴

A few months ago, when I was only a few months into my role at Cleo, I wrote about experiencing anxiety around failure when writing and deploying code.

Truth be told, I had completely forgotten about that post until I was debugging a SSH issue on my site this morning! But I wanted to take some time to reflect on how things have changed, nearly 6 months later.