Hey look, a vaguely related image from pexels.com! It's still only here to make this post look nicer in social media shares, though.
Hey look, a vaguely related image from pexels.com! It’s still only here to make this post look nicer in social media shares, though.

Happy thanksgiving readers!

In the spirit of thanksgiving (and not making you read too much when you’re just going to end up in a turkey coma), here are some things I’m grateful for:

Being lucky enough to enjoy doing a job I can make a good living at. The tech industry certainly has its flaws, but it beats the hell out of the jobs I had between high school and college where the only reason my employers didn’t pay me even less was because they legally couldn’t.

Incredible free resources like Khan Academy and the many, many MOOCs out there. It’s incredible how much stuff you can learn at no cost but your time.

Conferences that record their talks and put them online. Most of them have excellent sound and video quality too. Look at how many Sandi Metz talks you can watch without ever buying a conference ticket or even putting on pants!

Beginner friendly communities like Code Newbie and Java Ranch/Code Ranch. I love that there are places online where it’s okay to not know everything already.

Learn to code/learn to code better resources like Free Code Camp, Exercism, Programming Praxis, Code Kata, and so many more. People put incredible amounts of work into these tools just to help other people become better programmers and that’s awesome.

JSON – working with XML is generally terrible and I’m delighted JSON has become the new standard. It sounds petty but seriously, any day I don’t have to fight with XML is a good day :)

What about you, readers? What nerdy stuff are you grateful for?