To all my Twitter followers --

As a budding programmer and developer, I've found myself frequenting great websites that have resources I want to share. A few months of coding in Washington have got me thinking about how much more there is to learn.

That being said, I want to start connecting with people who share similar interests in the data visualization, programming and scientific reporting fields. I think the best way to do that is to share what I know as frequently as I can without being irritating.

What you can expect: pictures, stories and links geared toward people like me — budding developers and journalists on the verge of kickstarting a career in multimedia. In my tweets, you're going to see new ways to tell old stories. I can't promise that all my links will be on the cutting edge — but, as a novice programmer, they will be on my cutting edge.

Brand new to coding, or have a little experience with HTML? Great! It's only by seeing examples online that we begin to realize what is possible. And if you follow me - I'll follow you. I'd love to check out what you're building and what you find online. Let's help each other out.

Sincerely, 
@MaddoxNelson

That's right — about 2.5 weeks ago I hopped on a plane and zipped out to the nation's capitol. I thought that I would have had something insightful and exciting to write about by now, but considering I've spent most of my time walking around and going ERMAHGEERRRD AHM ERN WERSHINTERN that really hasn't had the chance to happen. So, rather than try to string some pseudo-"This happened to me, and this is what I've learned from it"-bullshit, here's a quick list of some of the things I've gotten to be part of while over here.

Met Kathleen Turner. Yeah, buddy, you know who I'm talking about. We're talking the star of "Body Heat" here, one of the spiciest stars of the 1980s (and her daughter is pretty darn cute too). She spoke about women's reproductive rights, and had a quote I've had ringing in my mind ever since: "I'm an optimist to the point of idiocy." It's something i've tried to keep in mind when I sometimes feel alone in such a large city.

Covered the birth of a panda cub. I also got the chance to take my now personal favorite photo of the panda baby daddy, Tian Tian. Here were some disgusting tidbits that didn't make it into my story: the semen used to artificially inseminate momma bear was the same batch used in 2005 that produced the first cub born. That means they used sperm from when I was a freshman in high school.

Unfortunately the cub died this morning. So that sucked.

Been in the same room as the President and a hot WNBA Team. You want to know what's surreal? Surreal is walking up to the fence outside of the White House and having guards let you in after you flash a badge. Obama was singing praises to the Minnesota Lynx, who kicked butt in the 2011 NBA Championship. Seeing the President of the United States in the White House, with my spicy homegirl sports team? Fantastic way to spend a rainy morning.

On that same trip to the National Mall, I walked through the Vietnam Memorial at the same time a group of veterans from Billings, Montana, were going through. I listened to them speak. "I found two buddies of mine on there. I went to high school with them," someone said. Another man looked at the wall for several moments in silence, a twisted expression on his face. I wasn't being paid to be an obnoxious reporter at that time, so I didn't take a photo of him.

I started to hear the voices of the other veterans I've interviewed in the past. All of them, in their own way, tried to make sense of the messes they had encountered and survived. Most of them had had at least half a century to think about it before they spoke to me. When they told me about love and death in war, they had a tendency to tell me about the minutiae that went along with it. Dancing with Parisian women. A plane that shook in 100-mph winds. The slippery stones of Normandy Beach.

And while there were plenty of things I would never be able to identify with, there were plenty of things that I could, like what it's like to be young in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack. To know that things have forever been altered, even if you can't yet say how or why.

I think that's why the Vietnam Memorial is my favorite memorial. Because I can see myself in the inscriptions of the dead. It's a reminder that they were people just like me. Even if they didn't have iPods, they still had music. It's so easy to forget that.

I don't know where I'm headed, or how I'll get there. I know almost no one in this city. But my train has left the station, and if the last couple weeks have been any indication, it's going to be one heck of a ride.

When you know you're at a turning point in your life, you know you have to do everything "one last time." It really is a wonderful excuse. 

For example, I need to grab a drink with my closest friends "one last time." As I pass the HyVee around lunch hour, I decide that I must have the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet "one last time." And never mind the fact that I only ever had Chipotle at Merle Hay once during my junior year — if I'm going to make these last few days count, I must become pregnant with a burrito baby "one last time."

As silly as most of these are, there really are some things that I will do for the last time. For example, I am in Mars Cafe right now, a small Drake coffeeshop that has been a staple of the community since 2006. I will never have a cup of something in here again, because it closes the day I leave. 

I'm not really broken up about it, but it does make me think. 

My defacto order freshman year was a selection of Chips and Hummus with a pot of Earl Grey tea. One time, I ate and drank it while studying for a physics test. I got a B (**best day ever!!!**). 

While I initially praised myself on my dedication and persistence, I quickly resorted to superstition. In the two weeks before the test, I'd order my chips and hummus maybe three times a week, until I was so hopped up on caffeine that baseballs started jumping across the page in the projectile motion problems. If a physics book ever starts resembling the Daily Prophet, it's time to order a beer or three (and Mars always had a daily happy hour).

I wrote dozens of articles for the Times-Delphic in this coffeeshop and most of my college papers. I don't know how many pages that might have been — hundreds?

This was where I came when I won awards for Periphery two years ago and last year. This is the place where people first asked me about the inspiration behind my writing, and I, flushed with excitement and nervousness tried to respond without being arrogant. No one ever really told me my writing was any good before Mars (with the exception of my parents and grade school teachers). It's because of those events that I've got a savings account slowly filling with money I can use to take a year off and write a novel or six. It's because of things that happened here that kept me dreaming.

I think it's funny Mars is closing at the same time the Curiosity Rover is doing so many amazing things in the place the shop got its name from. That robot is having fantastic adventure in a strange atmosphere. The landscapes are desolate, but there is something captivating in the images we see. There is something that keeps us coming back. Maybe it's a little bit of the grand unknown. Maybe it's the anticipation of what is to come. Maybe it is just that we need something to think about.

For me, Mars Cafe was a place where dreams came to hang out. Some came to pass, and some never left. There are a lot of places like that around college campuses. They hold personal meaning long after you have gone, even if they don't mean anything to anyone else. Remembering places like this helps me remember the excitement of why I came to them in the first place. When I leave Des Moines, I hope that stays with me.

Enduring readers, this is (just about) it. One week from today, I'll be leaving Des Moines for the northern woods of Minnesota, and after a couple weeks there, it'll be on to Washington, D.C.

And I'm never coming back.

"What?" People ask me. "Of course you'll come back to Des Moines. You'll come visit. You'll be here."

And yes, admittedly, things might not work out and I'll return to Iowa to finish my education major, which I added during my sophomore year when I became scared about my prospects in the journalism industry.

My fears, gratefully, failed to materialize. In May I accepted a one-year multimedia fellowship with Scripps-Howard in DC, and I'll spending the later days of 2012 in our nation's capital and (if the world doesn't end), most of 2013.

The position will not result in a job — which I understand. However, it gives me the chance to network extensively, provides me a place to live and a salary that should relieve a hefty chunk of my student debt. There is even a ten-week period in which my program is not in session, but in which I will be able to freelance (network! network!).

With such an opportunity, I am going into this full-steam ahead. In my mind, there is no coming back from this. If I find myself in Iowa again in the future, it's because I failed even though I tried my hardest. If there's anything I learned from college, it is that it is okay to fail, so long as you don't regret it. If I return to Drake in a year, it will be because I busted my buns trying to make it and couldn't. I won't fault myself for that, but I will fault myself for browsing Reddit all day when I could have been creating the foundations of a great career.

I'm scared to be leaving Des Moines. When I first arrived, I knew no one. Let me phrase that again: No one. I drove eight hours and moved myself in (with a little help from a couple roommates who became long-lasting friends). People made fun of my accent and didn't know what to think of my quirky personality traits (I was a physics and journalism major, they thought I was downright weird). I was depressed, too, although no one picked up on that, not even myself, until after I'd gotten through it.

As I wrap up these last few days in the city, I find myself struggling to make sense of it all. There are so many people that changed me. Without some of them, I would have been completely lost. Some of them I wish I had never met. Some of them introduced me to other people who introduced me to new opportunities and challenges. Some of them died.

I remember my first Sunday. I decided to go to the student mass at St. Kate's Catholic Church. I didn't go because I particularly felt like worshipping that day (and I didn't even particularly want the free wine). I went because I knew it would be familiar to me.

And it was familiar, so eerily familiar. The rituals were the same even if the setting was different. The bread was broken and the choir sang about it. Most of the students didn't sing, just like it had been in Catholic school. And late people tended to sneak in the back, just like the Catholic churches back home.

It was in that church that I knew that things were going to be OK, even if it took a while to work out. I wasn't moved by God, and I didn't have some sort of magical epiphany. I just felt, so strongly, that if I could find one thing in common, one thing that I understood, one thing that I had grown up with that I could talk about without sounding stupid — then I'd found a start. Something that I could grow, even if it took years.

I don't really go to church any more. Maybe that will change someday, and maybe it won't. I still like St. Kate's an awful lot. But once I got my feet planted and my stride, I never stopped moving. After a while I just sort of out grew the place, I guess. I wasn't exactly happy about leaving it, but I wasn't sorry either. Sometimes you just know when it's time to move on.

Today I was covering a political event, and I interviewed two 15-year-old enthusiastic politickers. They asked me if I'd met any famous people during my reporting. I told them yes, and listed off a few names.

Tonight, I find myself wishing I had answered the question differently, because I remember little of my interviews with celebrities or politicians. The interviews I remember are the ones I did with ordinary people who experienced or accomplished extraordinary things.

I can still quote from some of those interviews. 

"Man's inhumanity to man is almost impossible to define." 
-That was Conrad, the third American to step into Dachau. I interviewed him when I was 17. I cried with him. He's the only interview subject I ever did that with, because I later I learned to control my emotions as a journalist.

"When I first met her, she was wearing these wild, multicolored sneakers." 
-That was a professor, talking about one of her students who had recently passed away. The professor spoke of colors, over and over, a trend that was repeated when I spoke to the mourning parents.

"I guess you feel like you didn't get the job done. If I could do it, I'd go back there again."
-That was Don, talking about the murky end of the Korean War. He remembered vividly the opening days of the war, since he was on duty when the sirens began to blare.

"I'm not sad about it — I'm sorry about it. That's the way the world is now. You have to find your own solutions."
-That was Edna Schneiderman, talking about the first Schneiderman's Furniture she and her husband founded in Meadowlands Minnesota. The store was a staple to several rural communities, and when it closed in 2009 after 40 years of business, it left a hole in the region that can't be filled.

"I can tell you what war is. It's a glorious tribute to the stupidity of man."
-That was John, another veteran from the Korean War from the same story as Don. John's daughter convinced him to speak with me, and he wasn't receptive. But when he said this, he looked me dead in the eyes, and spoke with steel in his voice.

"To me, it's a rush. You don't need to do drugs — just go into a really dark basement. That's the rush. Most people are scared of the dark. I'm not."
-That was Don Larsen, a ghosthunter in Hibbing, who took me on an adventure with his fellow team through the Greyhound Bus Museum one hot summer night in 2009.

"You know what, it's so good to see that. It's so good to hear that, because Cameron can say that to him, and I can't."
-That was Nancy Hukka, a physical therapist, gesturing toward an interaction between amputee-athlete Cameron Clapp and one of her patients, who was struggling with the recent loss of a leg.

"I think all the athletes had a job cutting the grass."
-That was Mary Bryson, the first female editor-in-chief of the Times-Delphic, the Drake newspaper where I cut my chops on writing. She was speaking about life at Drake during the Great Depression.

These are just a fraction of the interviews that were important to me. These are the ones that moved me, that made me laugh out loud, cry, or get so angry at the circumstances. 

There are so many quotes I left unwritten. There are more that I didn't quite catch. There will be so many more quotes, so many more turns of phrase that will change me.

I would much rather introduce those kids to any of these people. That way they could hear what it really means to have something to say.