More than nothing.  It seems like yesterday I was incapable of opening SSMS, and now I'm creating tables in my very own MySQL database.  Actually, two databases once I realized that all my learning would benefit from not blowing away everything because of a mistake.  All the databases are still offloaded to GoDaddy because...well...it's still more efficient for me.
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You know what's still missing?  Constraints.  Gotta get that in there.

The anxiety of switching to Java and MySQL is going away pretty quickly, but I saw some PHP today.  I can't say that PHP is scary.  I've touched it once or twice since the 90's, but it's far, far from my favorite computer language.  Hopefully, I won't see any of that where I'm going.

I'm working on a MacBook: the $900 MacBook Air.  There is only 128GB of space on the drive.  I didn't want to install database engines on this machine.  I did consider installing MySQL on my wife's old laptop.  I got as far as wiping Windows 10 from the hard drive and installing Ubuntu, but it very slowly occurred to me that maintaining a database server would be a chore.

It takes enough work to learn this entirely new stack.  I wanted to offload some of the tedious administrative stuff.  I realized, I can use a database from my GoDaddy account.  Yay!  I created my database, username, and password.  

I installed MySQL Workbench on my MacBook, added the connection, and immediately started creating tables.  Well...actually, not quite.  Lot's of things still work the way I'm expecting, but not everything.  I've created one table, and It will take some reading and practice to do even this well.  I'm just grateful that I remembered I could just use a database on my web host and avoid the maintenance of a database server.

I wrapped up three years of reliable full-time employment today.  After this long, it feels weird that I don't work there anymore.  I hope I left things better than I found them.

After five uninterrupted years of .NET development, I'm jumping into Java.  I have no idea how this will work out, but I plan to post some project documents here to detail my progress.  Ultimately, I want to finish with a Java project that incorporates some UI automations using the Selenium WebDriver.

Even when things change, the best parts stay the same.