Welcome
My name is Beck and I'm a nurse in Alaska. I graduated from a university in northeast Portland in 2019 and have worked in various roles as a nurse since then. In the summer of 2022, I started studying computer science and software development with the goal of eventually switching to a tech focused career. I have created this website to share and elaborate on my resume, to give a better picture of who I am as an individual, and to display projects and code that I have written.
Visit the 'Live Projects' page to see projects written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript that are hosted as live web pages. Click on the 'Computer Science' section to see the specifics on how I am learning computer science topics, including what classes I am taking and what programming languages I am using. Click on the 'Resume' section to read about my work history and download a pdf version. Finally, 'What I'm Learning' is written in pseudo-blog fashion, with a short summary of what I'm working on month by month.
See the footer for my email and phone number if you are trying to get in touch with me. Also in the footer is the link to my Github account where you can see examples of code that I have written. My GitHub is where all of the code that I write is hosted.
My Story
When going to college, I decided to go the traditional route of completing a four year degree and living on campus. I went to Concordia University in Northeast Portland as an honors pre-nursing student. After two years, I got accepted into the official nursing program where the difficulty quickly ramped up. If I didn't get good grades, I would've been kicked out and I would've have had to find a new degree to work on. During that time, everything was so stressful that I considered on multiple occasions dropping out and finding a new career path but I was too afraid to do that.
I then started my career as a nurse in southern Oregon at a mid-sized hospital and, unfortunately, the start of the COVID pandemic was at the same time. It was at my lowest of times that I decided that I wanted to change careers. I learned HTML and CSS to make a blog and, while my plans to become famous by making a blog fell through, I found that I really enjoyed working with HTML and CSS. Later, when I researched true programming languages, I stumbled on Python, which has a non-intimidating syntax. I began studying Python on Codecademy.com with their exercises and actually enjoyed it even more than working with HTML and CSS. From there, I began to pursue this as my new career.
Currently, I work at an outpatient cardiac cath lab as an RN. I spend 40 hours per week working there and much of the rest of my time working on the skills that I will need to one day be successful in a software developer position. While there are many distractions along the way and it takes an incredible amount of focus to stay on track, I find a lot of joy in many of the things that I have learned. I will not stop until I am successful at finding work in the tech industry.
