The top of the mountain

It's been almost two months since I've quit my job, and I've spend at least 6 hours a day in front of a code editor most days since I quit. I'm trying to level of my skills, but it's starting to hit me that I should probably decide on a destination: a point where I've made it, the top of the mountain that I'm climbing.

The mountain's top

I want to be at a place where I've built well-tested, containerized production apps in Laravel, Django, Rails and Node.js that are backed by CI/CD pipelines. I want to be able to provision infrastructure with Terraform, manage server configuration with Ansible, and stand up a whole application in an automated fashion in less than an hour if I ever needed to do a from-the-ground-up deploy. I want to be able to manage production servers by myself and configure Nginx with confidence. I want comprehensive error-monitoring and logging set up. And I want an app in both the App Store and Google Play.

That's the top of the mountain that I'm currently climbing.

Of course there's more I'd like to learn, and I will continue learning after I arrive at this mountain's peak. But this buys me freedom from the constant stress of uncertainty around manual, error-prone testing and deployments. Learning these skills buys me the freedom to find a job I want rather than just find a job that matches the two technologies that I'm most familiar with.

Forward

There's a lot to dig into here. But I'm closer than I've ever been, and I'm moving faster than I ever have. Here's to ascending towards freedom.