Hello everyone!
I've been playing with very basic HTML, CSS and Javascript off and on for a couple of years. When the company that I was working at laid off half its people, I decided that I needed something more than an art degree and invested in my future by attending a Coding Bootcamp. It was intense and I learned a lot -- like how much more there is to learn

-- and Ruby on Rails. Just finished end of October this year.
At the moment, I'm trying to learn
Java in two weeks. And why in the world would I try to do something insane like that? A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to someone who was working at a company that I was interested in and she just mentioned that she would pass my resume to HR. I assumed that because the application process was closed down that nothing would come of it but then about a week ago, I received an email that invited me to attend a webinar beginning of January for learning more about the hiring process of said company. I contacted a friend who had just gone through the hiring process and she confirmed that, yes, I indeed am in the hiring pool and that I also needed to learn JAVA asap as that's the programming language that they used to
test candidates. I will most likely receive a take-home challenge. My friend said it took her about a week to complete it. There's a two-day onsite which also includes whiteboarding. So yeah, intense hiring process
Currently, halfway through "Head First Java" and I think I got through most of the harder bits like data structures and
polymorphism and starting to get a better grasp of reading my error messages. There's so much that I take for granted in Ruby that I am realizing now from learning Java. I appreciate that in Java, its structure. Java has also helped me understand more about the 'magic' that occurs with programming where in Ruby, things just happened for whatever reasons, like having any data types in an array? That's just crazy. Oh and I hated how punctuations were not consistent in Ruby.
I love working with data and if anyone can give me recommendations on challenges that I can do in Java, that would be super! Especially data structures. Terrible weakness of mine. Also trying to do Hacker Rank 30-day coding challenge in Java to build my algorithm practice.
Whewww!!! Thank you for getting to the end of this ramble.