I had to break through so many assumptions and limiting beliefs to get to this point. Now that I am here, my whole perspective of the physical and virtual world has changed. I can never go back, nor do I want to. What started out as a desperate attempt to stay valuable has turned into a quest for something. I'm not quite sure where this will lead.

What surprised me the most about development is the creativity required. It's one thing to start a small app project and maintain it on a github repo. Learning multiple codebases in JavaScript with multiple JS libraries and dependencies, then writing a Go middleware program to interface with it and external apis to send request bodies that contain patient data to redirects and sign in pages is a whole new level of abstraction that I've never encountered before.

The next surprise was the complexity of CI/CD. With different environments, to Docker, Kubernetes, Artifactory, Jenkins, just to name a few, has forced me to upskill at an incredible pace. I am learning how to focus on the bare minimum needed to accomplish the task, then go back on my own time to build a better foundation.

I have also learned just how vulnerable everything is. Coming from a military background I have learned just how vulnerable our physical world is, as well as our country, and now I have a better understanding of cybersecurity as well.

While I don't have a preference where I work/ what I learn for now; on my own time I'm interested in learning robotics, ML/LLM, and how we can utilize those for physical security, and space exploration/mining/habitation.