October was a good month. I had my first energy dip, and I also strangely felt like I was in a (good) groove for the first time. I had 4 days with 5h or more of studying, and I started branching out into building my own projects.
For the numbers: total year to date (as of oct 31) is 377.75h over 123 days for an average of 3.07 hours per day. Not too shabby. This month I did even better with 111.75 hours in 31 days for an average of 3.6h / day. For comparison september was an average of 2.6h / day! I started to feel the downside of pushing too hard on that front a few weeks back and I started easing up on how late I would stay up coding and I took a few naps over the weekend. Efficiency can start to spiral downwards pretty quickly once you are significantly overtired, and I wanted to nip that in the bud.
I worked on my focus. I started analyzing what I was learning and how to learn better. My strategy currently is to focus on javascript and try to build a few projects a week to reinforce the lessons along the way. Before I focused on solely javascript I worked on a python project, did most of learn ruby the hard way, and was also working on javascript algos and data structures. I still need to learn all of that stuff, but learning it in parallel is akin to not learning it at all.
I participated in hacktoberfest on github and had my first 5 pull requests accepted(!) and I have gotten a lot more comfortable using git on my laptop to clone, pull, push, and commit.
Bootcamp! I accidentally applied to a bootcamp, got accepted, and then got right back to studying. It starts the online portion in 66 days! I feel like all of my prep will help me be very well qualified to learn the lessons, but there is really no level of “overqualified” in this process. The better prepared I am going into school, the better prepared I will hopefully be coming out of school. Hopefully that translates into better job opportunities and a smoother transition into the workforce. In some ways I’m not concerned about needing to learn more before the bootcamp, but I am very concerned about needing to learn a lot more before the job search!
- Javascript: The good parts. • finished.
- learn ruby the hard way (75% complete) • on hold to focus on javascript
- udemy javascript algorithms and data structures
- udacity git and github • finished
- ruby koans • on hold to focus on javascript
- freecodecamp react, Bootstrap, jQuery, and sass • finished
- CodeWithMosh react • finished
- Modern React and Redux • ~50% complete
- Wes Bos’s Mastering Sublime Text (videos only) • finished
What I’m struggling with:
It’s tough to balance learning with practicing. I like the feeling of accomplishment when I finish a tutorial or a class, but it honestly feels a bit hollow when you need to refer back to the videos or source code in order to do the thing you just ‘learned.’ I’m committing to spending 2 or 3 nights a week working on projects. Those can be adding features to tutorial projects or making entirely new things.
I also need to lay out goals and consult my plans whenever I reach a goal. I need to have another two goals already in place or else it is really easy to lose momentum. When I don’t know what to work on it is easy to waste the night reading medium posts or tweets. Those are fine, but I need to be learning to code first, and then learning how to be a coder second. After I hit my first 100 days I lost a bit of momentum because I wasn’t sure what to study AND I think I had been harboring the idea that I would know how to code a lot better by the time I got there. The second thing will sort itself out in it’s own time, but the uncertainty can certainly be cleaned up with a plan.
Goals.
- React
- TDD
- node.js
- learn about deployment – docker / kubernetes / heroku
- databases