In February 2025, I had my theanswertolifetheuniverseandeverything birthday. Instead of, 'What do I want to be when I grow up?' that I usually ask as a joke, this time I asked myself, 'Am I doing what I wanted to do when I grew up?' (Keeping in mind that, for my first career choice opportunity at Kindergarten Graduation, the only option left to me was Cheerleader because they responded 'girls can't do that' when I chose Firefighter, and that my next longest aspiration was to be a famous novelist a la Stephen King or Dean Koontz.)

My thoughts were fraught for the next few weeks. I was still happy working in data integration, but did I want to spend the rest of my life in IT--assuming my generation and beyond of Americans will have the privelege of TRUE retirement--configuring middleware ETL tools like Informatica Cloud and writing basic data transformation and cleansing using multiple flavors of SQL daily?

The answer kept coming back YES!...and No.

Why?

Because the answer to my follow-up question, 'Okay, but are you being challenged?' was NO.

Then I looked 'around' (no traditional office in remote work, my favorite!) and asked, 'Do I see room for challenge and advancement where I am right now?' No prizes for correctly guessing the answer.

This left me in a pickle. 'Status Quo' may as well be a so-called 'four letter word' to me, so you could hear the gears gnashing in my brain. Even my hobbies, you know, the things I do for 'fun', are hard: ever tried hand spinning yarn from raw fibers? Long story short, if I'm not feeling challenged, it feels like my brain is rotting. It's so BORING.

After expressing all this to my husband, he suggested I start with skilling up by taking on the Cloud Resume Challenge. (He completed it himself to transition out of a decade in healthcare into IT, which is its own epic story that I hope to share more with you someday!) It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for: learning all kinds of new things to strengthen, build upon, and ultimately expand beyond the data integration, CRM administration, reports and dashboards skills I've been practicing professionally since 2014.

That's how I came to be writing these words. Every pixel of this website is part of this self-assigned 'homework'. It's nowhere close to finished but I've already come SO FAR since taking this fork in the road. While I may be talking to the proverbial brick wall here, it's all part of the process so talk I shall!

Before this train gets too far out of the station, caveat emptor:

In the spirit of the Challenge, there wil be NO step-by-step tutorials here. Why a technology or approach was chosen, What solutions were used, even the key tutorials I followed to implement them, sure! (because many tasks have taken piecing together several to accomplish, looking at you, Flask, Docker, and Lightsail).

While I'm not 100% Trainer at my core, I am passionate about acquiring and sharing knowledge. Does that mean I'm shooting for just the baseline? Heck no. I'm aiming for the stars beyond the Moon! Meaning, you'll see lots of bits and baubs in addition to the base elements called for in the Challenge. Want to hear the rest of this chapter of my story, you know what to do.

And if you've been considering a similar journey, now may be the perfect time to start asking yourself some questions....