*jumps in feet first*

I've officially done (counts on fingers) LOTS of new things over the course of the last few days (one of which was signing up for Hashnode)!

This takes me back to my high school days when my friends and I would create blogs (good ol' Blogger) and use them as an outlet for our randomness.

I'm here to tell you this blog will not be much different. I'll be using this blog as an outlet for all my randomness - just more developer/computer science-related, rather than teenage girl silliness (though maybe some of that, too).

But for now, an introduction! I'm a SAHM, college student, and casual nerd. I'm a class of '22 computer science/cyber security major with a background in liberal arts (how's that for a one-eighty). I tend to ramble, so you'll have to be patient with my stream-of-consciousness writing flow (also my excessive use of parentheses).

But there is actually a point to this post - a method to my madness! This piece of the digital universe will serve as a journal of my misadventures and mishaps through learning various coding languages. I have a nodding acquaintance with Python, Java, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS, but I'd like to strengthen that a little. My first challenge is Python, and I'll be using some books I found from No Starch Press, so I'll be posting the results of some of the exercises here, most likely, as well as some resources from FreeCodeCamp (I <3 FreeCodeCamp).

Since I'm also a cybersecurity person with an interest in red teaming, I'll probably also be posting walkthroughs of various ethical hacking resources from places like HackTheBox and TryHackMe, among others.

And if that wasn't enough, I've joined Hacktoberfest this year! Yes, little ol' me with verrrry little coding knowledge is going to attempt to contribute something meaningful to the opensource community...no pressure AT ALL. But I love me some swag. So there's naught else to be done but scour GitHub for possible areas I can be helpful. So far AppWrite's projects look the most promising, and they've assigned me an issue! Fingers crossed, haha.

I'm very excited, though, and that's overruling the nervousness. Just perusing some of these repositories and following the fine folks involved in this project (and opensource in general) has opened up so many new, fun, and exciting resources! I can't wait to see what the rest of the month brings.

Happy Hacktober! :)