My move from Japan is complete! This post comes to you from Nashville, Tennessee, where I spent my college days at Vandy and, now, where I'll be taking my next steps toward a career as a developer.

I spent much of February and pretty much all of March figuring out what to do next-- my teaching contract expired on March 31 and I'd already decided long ago (since last October, I believe) that I was going to be making a career change one way or another. So another year as a teacher was already ruled out. In retrospect I'm glad to have placed that pressure upon myself.

I gave consideration to staying at a relative's place in Florida and continuing to self-study Rails, but at some point in the process of furious googling for beginning developer opportunities I found out about Nashville Software School, a 6-month programming web development bootcamp that offers an apprenticeship program for residents/people with ties to Tennessee.

Lucky for me, right? I grew up and went to college in TN. Submitted my documents, interviewed, and now I'm sitting in Nashville (and my apartment is only about a 5-minute walk away from the school) waiting for classes to start tomorrow.

So that's what I've been up to. Came back to the US by way of Mexico City on 3/31.

I've been studying Rails until now, but my schedule from here looks like:

4/2015 - 7/2015: Front-end tech. (HTML/CSS/Javascript/JQuery/AJAX/etc.)

7/2015 - 10/2015: Node.js framework (backend)

So my backend experience is going to move from Rails to Node.js. Which is a bit of a change, but I'm up for anything. I'm super happy and excited to get all of my time and energy focused on programming and making this happen.

To that end I'm also looking to participate in Nashville meetups, principally Javascript from here on out, I suppose. And hackathons. Spent some time this morning getting signed up for those.

Will keep the blog updated!