Lately I have been drifting

It's been a month already? Wow. I mean a month since I last wrote here. Clearly, I have taken quite the chill pill when it comes to blogging and personal project stuff.

I tend to do this though. I work in waves it would seem. Really, it's more about the fact that I'm currently searching for my "next thing". These past 7-8 months have been all about me trying to leave my shitty job and become a programmer.

I've officially accomplished all of those goals, and currently have nothing big or exciting to work towards. I have a feeling that the reason MOST people just wander through life without ever accomplishing anything huge is the same reason I haven't done too much this past month in the public eye.

It's all about a combination of things I assume.
  * Having a passion for something
  * Trying to improve something that is painful
  * A clear objective and path to complete it

Those were the things that had me working my ass off to reach the level I did this year. Currently I'd rate my level of happiness at "meh". In other words, I am not UNHAPPY, but I also have nothing exciting to think about or talk about.

This month I consumed about 7 audiobooks on Audible. I really enjoy listening to them at the 3x speed. I was going to listen to some twice, but I just keep finding new ones that I want to go through.

I realize that one of my number one passions in life is just learning things. I get a LOT of enjoyment from sharing what I have learned, and creating videos or blog posts but I just don't ever prioritize or value doing that so what happens is I look up and realize it's been over a month!

I have a huge list of things that I WANT to share with people, but then before I do I learn 5 more things that I want to share and just get carried away. I have to say, there is a large amount of respect that I hold for people who consistently write quality content.

It's fun and rewarding, but keeping that habit isn't easy!

So overall, that's my update. I just wanted to make it clear that I am currently in "drifter" mode as I search within for what is essential to me, and what lofty and exciting goal I want to pursue next will be.

Planning to do some sleep hacking

Alright, closing in on the month of July. Good stuff happening. IBM Job is
locked in. I can give up all of the stress from looking for jobs. Now to focus
on being happy.

Plans for the next 2 months? Freelance to pay the bills...approx 5 hours 5 days
per week. Yep 25 hrs np. Only charging $40/hr, but that's plenty to keep me
going for now. If I were to take on any other work I'd probably go up to $60 minimum.

Can leave me with extra time for learning, writing, and social. Wee!

So, as of this morning I woke up feeling AMAZING. Got sleepy around 8-ish? Just
crashed out, woke up naturally this morning around 1:30am and I haven't felt
this good in...I don't KNOW how long.

This has led me to think, okay I need to start studying this sleep thing. I
heard on a podcast about Buck Fuller doing the Dymaxion sleep. 30 minutes
every 6 hours. Great, that's perfect for me.

The trick I believe, is that he wrote down/monitored the times when he felt
tired, and put in a nap during that time. If I use that same approach, I feel
that I can cut out the long periods of sleep and get that benefit that I just
experienced this morning.

Off the top of my head, I get tired around 4-5pm, and 9pm? Maybe around 12. Not
sure honestly that's a best guestimate, so I'll just monitor it the next few
days.

Instead of going cold-turkey poly I'll probably first get used to sleeping maybe
4hrs and tossing in a 30 min nap when I get tired during the day. Most people
I've researched tend to fail (myself included in previous attempts) due to not
switching to poly gradually. Hopefully I can fix that.

Once I adjust to napping, and (oh btw) learning to sleep upright...just in case
I have to sleep somewhere without a bed, in my car, on a couch etc...that's when
I can try to slowly phase out more of that core sleep time.

That's probably the most I should look into it for now. I have to get some
personal data going before I make hard decisions. For now though, I purchased
some 33dec sound blocking ear foam thingies, and a sleep mask.

And...some other ramblings

I learned about a few awesome plants that you can fill your house with to
improve the oxygen, and supposedly make you more productive. I'm 100% down for
doing that, but I'll wait until I move to Austin. For now, I pinned it on the
"to get" Trello board.

My Pavlok band should be here before too long hopefully, and so I'm looking
forward to some great strides being made in the next 2 months.

I'll be mapping out what content I'd like to get written over the next couple of
days, and hopefully have July planned in such a way that I can get into the
habit of daily writing easily by just pulling from a list of topics. It's much
harder if I don't even know what I'm going to write about!

Well, any more writing and about my "plans" would just be rambling and futile so
I'll get back to work now :)

SUCCESS! I got a job

I got the job! Pretty good offer as well. But first, let's talk about my personal goals etc.

So June was a bit wishy-washy as far as personal habits go. My single biggest issue is I've had trouble getting out of bed and being exhausted, and many more seizures. Could be stress? Not sure. Either way, it sucks. I haven't kept up with workouts, but I've done some squats / pushups to stay warmed up and active a bit.

I wanted to do a lot of personal content creation and working on my website but I really did none of that at all. I think I just overloaded myself a bit and couldn't focus.

Overall it was a success in the sense that I doubled my hourly rate for my freelance, got 2 job offers, 1 which I've now accepted and will be making a lot more money, and moving to Austin.

All of my hard work has finally paid off. The things I've been doing up until now have led to this moment really. I now just have to "try" and be patient, as the job won't start until Sept 1st. No probs, that gives me time to really do things I enjoy while freelancing.

I may do some writing, catch up on some tv shows, maybe play a game or two?

Overall I just want to enjoy myself and keep learning things without allowing myself to stress...myself. Ha.

Things are looking good!

So, just because I reached a big milestone / goal doesn't mean I'm done. I don't believe in stopping or slowing down. I certainly have waves of energy that go up and down, and so I'm on the downward ride of a huge spike of energy, which is fine.

That said, I have ideas for locking in good habit change and rituals. I've purchased a Pavlok armband, which should help me to kick any bad habits, and lock in the really good ones.

Going forward, I want to spend anywhere from 2-3 hours in the morning focusing on learning and writing...or really just writing / content creation in general.  Perhaps an hour or two itself for learning ha.

I don't know, I always have high expectations but what I've been learning recently is that it's not about getting those things done, but more about how hard you work. That's what I need to start focusing my measure of success on.

Alright, this is long enough. I'm excited to plan out my strategy for the month of July. We will see where it goes from here.

Two weeks and two interviews

Well then! I haven't written my weekly recap in a while. Let's try to catch up on all of the stuff that is going on. So since the last recap, I've had two very successful interviews. One with FantasyHub and one with IBM Design. I got an offer with both, was completely floored with how amazing IBM was. Even though I wanted to start soon, I declined the FantasyHub offer.

Now I have been reviewing my thoughts these past 2 weeks on my habits and what I've been doing and it seems like I have a lot of excuses for NOT doing some of the things I've written down that I'd like to do. I haven't been doing my Insanity, content writing, pomodoros, and many other things.

Overall this month has been a bit of a wash and I think I'll have to stop beating myself up over it and just accept that I probably need it. I know I need that vacation time, even though I can't really consider this month "vacation" since I'm being hard on myself about doing it but it has been relaxing to just say "meh" and chill.

A lot of it is me sitting around thinking, "Well, I've finally done it...after 6 months of hard work I've finally got to the point where I can get a job that I want!" I'm getting the feeling that because of the fact that my life is about to change so drastically, I've already begun distancing myself from where I am now, and it's causing me to want to just push the fast forward button and that's exhausting.

I finally did a marathon of Game of Thrones. The first time I've let myself watch tv shows since I deleted everything back in January. I have been getting tons of inspiration from watching TED talks and other various things.

Overall, I still have some waiting to do (job wont start until Sept) and there are a lot of questions as well...but overall I am really excited.

Hopefully I can get through this massive annoying exhaustion thing where I just randomly can't seem to get out of bed, and then the next day I have tons of energy. I don't get it. I've been great for 5 months but the middle of May is when this really started happening.

I'm not sure if it is mental, physical, or both.

Morning Writing + Timeboxing is very effective

Overall this week was a bit weird to me. I got a lot of content writing done. I do it first thing in the morning, and time-box it out to around 2 hours. I haven't posted them all yet (queuing it up) but I have gotten something done every day.

But, emotions and tiredness!

Overall I didn't FEEL very productive, and most of the reason was that I didn't have a solid plan I think. In other words, I didn't really have something to work on. I was hoping to get some freelance in, and I did get about 10 hours done but other than that not much.

I still have the recurring theme of exhaustion and sometimes just falling asleep and I don't know what is causing that. Maybe it's just my personal cycle. Hard to tell really, but if I can figure it out that would be great.

Networking feels to be paying off

I had some good networking this week. I did well in a front end dev interview for IBM Design, and set up a couple more interviews which I will have good reference to. More on how that goes next week...

Inspiration is strong with this one

I've been watching the Tim Ferris show and getting inspired by some of the ideas in that. I haven't really blogged or tracked it, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts. In fact, it's getting to the point where I am actually running OUT of podcast episodes because I've listened to EVERY SINGLE episode of multiple massive podcasts.

I think a lot of inspiration and ideas has come from listening to these various episodes, and so maybe I should promote podcast listening more to people. It could just be that I am constantly thinking about programming and ways to learn more.

When you have a sole focus, it's really easy to find opportunities to improve. Being scattered tends to lead nowhere. Something to think about for sure.

So what's the plan?

If some freelance work doesn't pop up for me to get done (which I really need in order to pay the bills) I'll be spending the next two days streaming myself doing a bit of a 'workathon' where I just try to go pure pomodoros all day long on one singular focus (improving my website in this case)

I'll be improving the portfolio, building an online resume, adding recent projects and reorganizing it to look more professional, and even redoing my About page as well. Soon I'll have my roommate take more photos of me to try and get a good consistent Avatar image that I can use going forward in branding myself.

I'll see how it goes (the workathon days) and if I enjoy it, maybe I'll use that idea to do a content creation workathon. I want to build a video website similar to railsclips, eventedmind, or egghead.io so perhaps that would be a cool project to build and create a video series of me building it?

On Monday I do have a phone interview, so that will interrupt my flow for a bit and depending on how it goes I could have other things to do so I'll play it by ear on that. Not the most ideal thing for this type of challenge, but this is more of a test run anyways to see how I do and maybe I'll try and pull off the week-long challenge like the time-lapse guy.

I did several week races, so if I put together enough work on something I really enjoy doing I am sure I can pull something off!

After the next two days of test running that idea, if I don't have something to work on I think I'll spend the large portion of the day learning. I want to start knocking off some of my learning Trello cards such as getting into pure Node, Angular, Gulp, React even perhaps.

Final thoughts?

Well, this recap was way longer than I thought it would be but I had some more fruitful thoughts after all! See you next week. Let's see how far I can get!

OH! One more thing, I have been doing a better job of tracking stuff on my main Kanban board. I cleaned it up a lot and reorganized what I'm actually tracking. I'm really happy about it and should have some good data by the end of the month, which is great because I'm doing a talk on Kanban productivity for a local meetup haha.

Okay peace out.

Got the Geekdom membership. Teamwork FTW!

I had a heck of a lot of fun this past week! I spent most of my time at the Geekdom working alongside Andrew and Tim for the Camp Gladiator website wedesign. It does present new challenges of trying to stay productive when being around people that you are working with, but also the ability to collab and figure things out makes it much more interesting.

I learned a lot about Angular and Grunt, although I'd have to really dive in and maybe do a tutorial to get it down 100%. Becoming a member of Geekdom is a good feeling as well, because being up there makes it easy to attend any of the events, and meet other people in the community.

Outside of doing mostly work there, I have been feeling quite exhausted after waking up in the mornings and sometimes sleeping a lot more. I missed / did half of a workout on 2 days so that sucked, but overall from a month of Insanity I can tell I am in way better shape and LOOK a lot better as well. I'm happy with my progress so far, and will continue to work hard going into the next 5 weeks.

That's pretty much it for the recap. I had a lot of high energy work done, but it was pretty dense so there isn't many small things to discuss. I'll be diving into my upcoming plans for my monthly recap.

Networking could be the key

Week 3 of Discpline month

This week was interesting, I had some wins and fails. I'm starting to see a pattern with just about everything taking way longer than I predict for it to. It took me several hours to do the "Why Vim?" video, AND several hours to put together the talk for the Vim/Tmux IDE talk I did this week.

Overall I did some cool stuff however so I can't discredit myself too much. I hosted an online hackathon type of project, and I finished it up enough to display as a portfolio project which is awesome. I did a decent amount of freelance (not near as much as I NEED to do) but I met a great guy after doing the talk and ended up being offered some freelance where I pair with him up at the Geekdom downtown which was a lot of fun.

I ended up missing a day of exercise yesterday after sleeping an additional 5 hours randomly. That was odd, but it happens I guess. I just woke up and could NOT function and passed out. Other than that incident, I've been easily getting 4-5 hours of sleep and feeling amazing.

Even though it hasn't been perfect, this month of doing habits and discipline has been great. I'm really looking forward to solidifying and ramping things up going forward so that I can keep pushing myself and growing.

I'm at a point now where I just need to put in more job apps and get hired, because the only other thing I can do in my learning is just create more apps...so I'm more than 100% capable of getting any job IMO. Now the trick is to convince someone else of that lol.

I may not have to get a job as soon as I had thought if this relationship with the guy I started working with last night goes well, because he has a lot of work and is willing to share.

Overall, I'm happy with my progress and I'm learning a ton. I REALLY want to ramp things up even further, and get great at things like React as well. I may be jumping into some Angular as I help on this other project which is fine as also since there is a lot of work with that framework. Anyway, I'll be pumping out more content later and giving you guys an update after this next week rolls around!

I Really Like Front End! - Week 2 Recap - May 2015

A new format

Alright, so this kind of marks the 2nd weekly recap, which I'll be doing now instead of the update every 2-3 days. I wanted to be a little more descriptive and what not about what I've been up to, and also since I do a daily 'standup' or whatever it makes less sense to do the regular posts.

Anyway, this past week was mostly spent working on my website in terms of "What did I get done?" Only 12 hours were spent on freelance work, so kind of lacking there especially since I will be relying on that for paying bills lol.

Also, 4 days of the week were a bit of a "doesn't matter how productive I am" because I was home visiting family for the first time since October.I'd say one trip every 6 months isn't so bad! Ha...

I've now taken on creating a weekly resource roundup for CodeNewbie so that should be a fun way to help out. I'd like to take more time out for writing up posts and possibly some guest posting as well. The biggest thing, even though it hasn't hit me just yet, is that I REALLY need to get some work to at least sustain my bills so that I can keep learning and creating content.

Lessons learned

As for learning stuff, I was dedicating about 30m-1hr in the mornings to reading over and doing various learning stuff but that time frame doesn't always get used for that. I have done a decent amount of reading into design related stuff (my focus for the month) but several days were spent ACTUALLY designing stuff on my website, which to be honest is fine. I learn by doing anyways.

I actually can't even tell you anything major that I learned from the reading and what not, but the work I did on the website however has taught me several things including:

1. Best text reading width is 50 minimum up to about 75 characters per line. I designed my responsive breakpoints to hit these numbers.
2. Yep, also learned how to do responsive breakpoints and change sizing on various things, and that is awesome!
3. Learned some ideas about animation best practices, still more to look up though.
4. That's about it, it's only been a week-ish hah!

Anyway, I'm on lesson 5 of Hack design. There are 50. Going to take a while man. That's okay. I also have many other things I want to learn, so that could put some stops in the way of getting through ALL of that. I probably need to go through the Bulletproof Meteor course, and I also wanted to jump into the MongoDB class starting up in a week or so.

What next?

More than anything, I'm a bit unsure of what to do next. I'm only able to focus on so many things, but I don't 100% know any more what that 20% for the 80/20 rule would be. I can say that lately I have really been enjoying doing front end stuff with my website. I really enjoy it, and did have the idea to eventually put together a bunch of cool demos to show off on my portfolio page.

I could try to polish up my personal finance app thing but I've gotten a bit disinterested in doing more on it. I kind of want to do some of the 'Basejumps' in Meteor from the FreeCodeCamp.com roadmap. I think that would be a neat experiment into how quick I can prototype stuff out, and give me a chance to create small apps in various ways and use different packages etc.

In addition to that, it would give me a reason to do some pairing / streaming / blog posts or whatever to explain how I did them. I have SO many blog post and video content ideas but I just haven't gotten them out. I almost want to take more days to just get some of that stuff out. I haven't been as motivated to get them done as I have been to just tinker on my website. Motivation is hard!

Ramblings

That is an interesting thing for me to bring up though, as motivation is an emotion. It's discipline and habit that allow you to get things done. If I really want to get that kind of content going, I would need to make the creation of it a habit somehow. Something to put though into I think, if I could put together a process that helps me get content created while learning / doing then I think I can make a big difference.

Well, that seems to be an appropriate amount of blabbing for this week. I've mostly covered what my issues have been. I'm hoping to have a lot to share on next week's recap, because it SHOULD be mostly free for me to just workworkwork :P

See you next Saturday!

Recap for Week One of "Discipline Month"

Sleepy Sleepy!

Interesting first week of my whole "discipline" month. I am really liking the habit structure overall. I can tell that making all of these important things habits is going to elevate the level of what I get done by a huge amount.

So far the trend for this week has been exhaustion though. I haven't been able to stay productive for really an entire section of time let alone both splits of productive working time I've scheduled. For a few days I've had to just pass out and sleep for a few more  hours.

I'm chalking that up to starting Insanity. My body is just physically tired PLUS working on mentally tiring coding problems is causing the overload. Overall I predict this to be temporary. I recall back when I did P90X years ago that the first 2-3 weeks were hell.

My roommates also are helping to confirm that I'll be tired for this first month, and then I'll have a lot of excess energy (or probably in my case, just enough to get through what I've scheduled haha)

Not as bad as I thought it would be

Interestly, I haven't had to "punish" myself at all. I've done really well with sticking to the plan and not cheating at all. I really don't want to get slapped, and I REALLY want my coffee and chocolate rewards so...hey I guess I did well on those choices hehe.

Need a better way to track time

I've been a little bit indecisive on the app I was going to build. I want to do the habits thing, but I just got the idea today to tweak it a bit and integrate some pomodoro stuff into it based on my experiences with Kanban so far. What I would like to do is make...instead of creating the tasks and tracking them, I'd like to have a timer I click and it beeps at me after the interval, and then I enter in what I got done during that time.

Overall it would be similar but it would allow me to track periods of time when I usually don't...in other words I'm getting through the day with like 3-5 hours of pomodoro but I have no idea where the rest of the time went! This is because sometimes I'll spend half an hour here or an hour there doing various things which weren't written down so I don't start the timer.

Anyway, that's the idea.

A NEW challenger approaches!

This afternoon, and through Tuesday I'll be visiting home so it will be interesting to see how that effects my habits / productivity being away. I'll have to push myself pretty hard to still do the Insanity workouts. I think I can strike a balance of keeping up the habits and enjoying my visit to family so I'll just have to work with the challenge.

I've been given the opportunity to do enough freelance to keep my bills paid, so I'll probably skip taking another random crappy $11/hr job to stay afloat and that should allow me to actually allocate more time to learning and content creation. I really want to begin putting out more videos AND blog posts, so I'll think through that later.

Ideas

One idea I had though, was to make some sort of short coding tips website similar to RailsClips, Egghead.io, or Ruby Tapas. I think a mix of those with my own style would be a lot of fun for me. Again though, it will require some thinking out before I take that leap. For now I'll keep doing my blog posts and youtube vids.

Anyway, as a TLDR...first week went well. Few stumbles and definitely need lots of improvement but I'm not unhappy with the progress. Will push on and try to ramp up!

INSANITY!

You lack discipline!

So last that I wrote, I was talking about my trouble with discipline and so as I planned out my strategy for May I've put myself in a position to try and correct that. I've scheduled at very rigorously how my day will go in terms of habits I want to integrate and things to test my discipline.

I have a chart showing punishments and rewards for not doing things. For example, if I don't get up without snooze and make my bed right away I get a big slap on the wrist (the Pavlok shock band was too expensive, so slaps will do for now).

I've added in mandatory morning writing, followed by meditation, and then an Insanity workout. Whoa, I am SO sore (day 2 completed so far). I am not even sure how I am going to handle today's exercise haha. Overall though I'm looking forward to getting into really good physical shape as I know it will help me out mentally as well.

I've also been doing the Hot/Cold shower thing and it's really cool. The cold part sucks, sure, but it makes you get this huge adrenaline rush and really fires you up to get going, and gets your breathing going for sure.

Just might have a job soon (I've said this before lol)

I feel really good about some of the upcoming job prospects. I've got several interviews lined up, and going back and forth with emails for a few others. Bumping up the number of apps I place certainly helps, but I'm sure refining my e-mail message and resume are part of it as well. Another thing, is unless the position specifically states they want a senior with 5+ years that can LEAD the team, I am applying for it.

What I've found is that in like 90% of the cases there is no "junior" position listings. There simply is either "2-3 years of experience" or "Senior with 5-10 Years" and so I've learned from speaking with others the 2-3 years is just a way of saying, "We want someone who can code." That's me!

Time chunking evolved

I have my month planned in chunks of time now, rather than by week. So I just finished up two days of content writing which gave me the posts for the month. Once I pick up a job I'll probably push that to like 4 days focused on content writing.

Upcoming is a few "hack days" where I put together a project using React / Ionic in an attempt to make a phone app. Most likely a habit tracking app. Next I'll be working to finish up the freelance project Josh Owens gave me to work on integrating a CMS backend and calendar API into a wedding planning website. Seems fun.

Alright, that's me summed up the last few days. Onward to the meditation time, and I'll talk to you in a couple of days. :)

It Has Begun!

I've done it! I quit my job as ATT customer support finally. I feel so good
about this. I had another 'temp' job lined up started a week later, but decided
to push it to 3 weeks later so that I can really focus on my personal stuff. I
have enough money saved AND I was able to land some freelance work that will
give me approx the amount of money that I would have gotten working for 2-3
weeks.

Lately I've had my discipline and efficiency levels tested. In other words, I've
been faltering a bit. This is PROBABLy expected. I have been on full high octane
mode for months now which is better than I've ever done in the past, but these
motivation things will come in waves and no human is perfect...I'm surprised
I've been able to push myself this hard for so long.

That said I really want to continue to grow and learn at a rapid pace so I have
some plans going forward for April, which I'll be able to test my theory on and
chat about as I try it out.

For now, I want to chat about this Shock Therapy idea that you can shock
yourself to eliminate habits. I don't have the money for the band itself (it's
like $190) but I decided ever time I bit my lips I'd slap the shit out of my
wrist, and after 3 days I now catch myself each time and don't do it.

I'm going to brainstorm out other habits I'd like to add or remove so that I can
apply this same technique. I may eventually get that band once I get a job
again because this is awesome. I can make so many changes by adding micro-habits
and removing bad habits.

I was chatting with my roommate about a weakness of mine for years being my lack
of discipline, and so I believe putting some hard focus on improving it will
really help me a LOT in the immediate future (and the long run obviously).

I really love overcoming challenges, but I definitely need to layer even more
difficulties into my life so that I can grow that way as well.

I've started doing the meditating which is difficult, but I am not as consistent
as I'd like. I need to begin waking up a bit earlier, I've played around with
sleep times and tried out 7 hours again but didn't change my time to bed, so I'm
getting going around 8-ish and that makes me feel WAY less productive since I'm
supercharged when I get up around 5am and nobody else is up and no sun is up
yet.

The other thing I've tried doing is taking the hot/cold showers and ending on
cold. I'm still a bit wimpy about it and only doing a small amount of cold but
if I am moving in the right direction that helps.

The next step is to get really serious about my fitness. I have been dabblign
around doing some bike riding, a bit of jogging, and some very light stuff in
between pomodoros but now I'd like to do a full on Insanity cycle (the actual
insanity workout program). If I complete that I may transition into P90X. I'd do
P90X right now but I can't realy put the money forth to go get the weights I
need...I need just around 200 bucks extra or so to do that but I'm pretty damn
broke lol.

There is a ton more I can talk about but this post is already too long winded so
I'll stop there.

Go Big or go Broke

Alright I suppose there is a good amount to chat about, as I have skipped a recap or two.

Focus with progress but not perfect

I'm really doing my best to work things out as to what the most important things to focus on are. I haven't been as strict on tracking ALL of the time on specific tasks on the kanban flow now that I've broken up some stuff into features. The main thing I'm working on is just focusing, and the Focus@Will app really helps with that.

I've been going much slower with the finance app and I suppose a lot of it is that I've made it more complex than necessary by adding in all of the requirements such as x-editable etc. Either way it's okay in the end, but it's causing me to have a pushed back timeline. Something to learn from for sure. At least I am learning a TON and I'm very happy that it's finally getting resolved.

More pairing!

I've done quite a bit more pairing and it has been extremely helpful and FUN. The more I do it, the more excited I get because it's very enjoyable to work out problems with other people. I've been creating Google hangouts for people to join into via Codebuddies.org, in addition to offering to pair on challenges in various Slack chats.

I have enough leeway to cover my butt for about 1-2 months, and it would be simple enough to also apply to some other 'easy to get' or part time jobs as a 'just in case' for the mean-time.

My plan going forward

I've begun to ramp up the amount of job apps I'm putting in, as I KNOW I am 100% ready for a large number of positions and so I just have to get in front of people and interview. I've gotten to the point where I want to take the risk of just leaving my current job and making a final push to getting hired in a dev role. I think I am slowly losing my sanity trying to spend 40 hours a day doing something I absolutely despise after ALSO spending another 35-40 hours beforehand working my ass off on other things.

I'm going to try and be very disciplined and stick to some hard habits and techniques to keep myself running with high energy. My day should look something like the following if I leave my day job and do this job search full time:

1. Wake up between 6-7 hours of sleep via Sleep Timer app
2. Downstairs to get pre-brewed cold coffee from frig, and heat up / eat breakfast.
3. 20 minutes of meditation
4. Some quick exercise such as squats or pushups etc to get blood pumping
5. Write out my daily standup, (what did I do, what am I doing today)
6. Hot/Cold shower
7. Start working on project (inside a hangout if it makes sense)
8. Around Noon - do a workout. I haven't planned this yet...but maybe a bike ride or otherwise a guided exercise like Insanity / P90X
1. Also I would do this first thing in the morning, but I'm too afraid of having siezures in the first couple hours of waking up...I've had too many bad experiences with working out in the morning and injuring myself.
9. Continue working on project
10. Around 3ish, start doing networking stuff and filling out job apps etc. Need to get at least 5 completed ideally.
11. I'm not too worried about what happens after that. Most likely I'll either continue working on whatever I choose, or doing a blog post, or just pairing and doing learning at night. Can't force myself to be SUPER productive for more than 6-8 hours and expect good results.

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind, Happy Life

Now that I've been meditating twice a day for 10 minutes each, I do feel a bit
more calm and less stressed out. Even though the job hasn't let up on it's
shittiness, for some reason I've just begun to be mindful about it and not get
bothered so much. It really seems to be helping!

It's funny and a bit weird too, as I've been listening to podcasts all week (as I have been for months) and like almost ALL of them are suggesting doing meditation in the morning and many talk about the Head Space app that I've been using also. Guess that's positive affirmation too :)

In addition to the meditations, I've decided to go biking/running (mostly biking b/c it's really fun) every other day. It's an easy way for me to get in the exercise I need since I enjoy it so much.

Social feedback

I'm really happy about the reception my Kanban video is getting. Apparently a lot of people have great things to say about it, and also some of my articles are getting complimented too.

After talking to Linda from Codebuddies.org last night, she suggested doing a 100daysofcode challenge, where we blog or tweet about something learned each day. Sounds fun, and I might do that.

Feature Creep

I've been continually adding tasks to my money project, so it's getting a bit of feature creep. Mostly I need to remember that to get it presentable and out I just need to focus on core functionality and not adding a ton of bells and whistles at the moment.

Other than that, I did my first pull request yesterday adding user roles and security to the Meteor Club Podcast website. I have another pairing session for that tomorrow also, so I'm glad with where that is going.

FOCUS

I just really started to use this Focus@Will app a lot more, big time yesterday and even changed the size of my pomodoro upward and I felt like I was really able to focus way more.

I wasn't really paying attention to it earlier, but I'm going to watch how much more I can focus with it as it does seem like a huge boost and I've been hearing more about it lately also.

That's all for now, peace yo!

Pairing for the win!

Alright so I did a small bit of work on my website and it's slowly getting where
I want it to be. I didn't really do any work on making it responsive as that
feels like a pretty good chunk of work and I was looking to relax on my day off
(which I really did).

Yesterday was good fun as I did some pairing on a few exercism.io projects after
completing javascript koans. Even though I felt pretty good about my javascript
knowledge, I learned a ton! Pairing is great, because you can talk out the
problems and one person can look something up while you are trying to write out
the problem.

Mindfulness

I picked up the Head Space app to help give me tips and guide me along on
meditations. I figure I'll use the app for 1-2 weeks to soak up any good ideas
and practices from it, and then move back to self directed again.

I'm pretty much thinking that I have to get back into exercising even more than
I have been. I'm doing the bike riding and really light moving around, but it
would be good to really make sure I'm doing some stuff to get my heart pumping
each day.

Overall, the more stress I release through meditation and exercise...the more
work I will get done and the more productive I can remain. That's the thing to
keep in mind.

When will it end?

What did I do?

The past few days were mostly spent working through getting a good grasp of iron router, and how to have it internet with my app. I feel so much more competent now, but it sucked that it took so long!

No probs, I've got it now. Another big part of it was that I was also using it for a more uncommon thing I suppose, which was actually going to another route (a transaction detail) with just a modal, which meant I needed to KEEP the data behind that modal popup while still being on another route. Took several hours but I got it working and now it's awesome!

Productivity

My productivity was so-so. One day was rough because of bad sleep (which I have data to prove, this sleep app shows I didn't get many REM cycles) and then I had seizures, and I felt like poop blah blah.
Whatever it's all good. Mostly I'm doing okay with not getting WAY distracted with chats. I still use the chat, but now it's for sharing my thoughts of what I'm currently coding and asking for help which gets me moving quicker in that sense. Still working on it though!

Health Stuff

I'm not really working out like I would want to. I haven't decided exactly how I want to approach this. I could start doing P90X but that takes up SO much time.

I guess just doing the running was alright, but I was demotivated to do that due to some heavy rain lately, and I'm too big of a wimp to go run in that crap.

Perhaps I'll just try to make it one of those gradual habit things like, "I just have to walk out the door and across the street" habits...and then if I still don't feel like walking or running I can come back. Lol, sounds odd but that's how successful people keep so many habits going. Just small things that are almost impossible to fail.

Going forward

I realized I haven't been applying for jobs recently, and this other one has seemed to fall through so I decided I certainly want to get maybe 1 app in a day. I am SO FREAKING done with my current job. It's so stressful at the moment because the volume of calls has increased to the point where there is LITERALLy 9 hours of back to back calls with zero downtime.

I just feel so exhausted every day, and plus the type of calls I take now as an SOS rep are getting ridiculous. If it was simple stuff, I'd be less bothered by it. I would have applied and got some of the promotions they offered recently, however I decided to decline those due to really wanting to push myself into a programming job. Blah, just taking longer than I want.

There is my rant, and now it's time to get rolling! I'm excited to have this app finally come together soon and start being usable, and for the next few days I'll be working on content creation. I really liked the articles and videos I put out recently, so I know it will only get better going forward.

It's such a good feeling to get feedback

Now that I've been creating content again for a short time and getting feedback, and seeing the retweets come in I am really stoked. It's a great feeling being able to see someone ask a question in a chat or forum, and have a video or post to link them as an answer!

Another cool thing I'll have to keep in mind is the amount of feedback that I get through Youtube. There are some great questions that come in there, which can be turned into posts as well.

I added comments and analytics to my actual website so I can start to see how people interact there. I definitely need to do a better front page though. It looks 'okay' on desktop but for some reason it gets all wonky on mobile and the view blog link isn't even clickable!

I had a chat with Josh about figuring out if I am ready for jobs or how to know, and he gave me the opportunity to work with him on one of his projects and list him as an employer / job experience so I took him up on that. I'll be doing some work on his upcoming podcast, which I chose to do since I want to eventually start my own podcast as well. I mean, I do like talking and all haha.

And...some health related stuff

So I recently went back to the 6 hours of sleep, but last night I grabbed a sleep timer app which is supposed to detect your cycles and wake you up at the right time. It actually woke me up at 5 hours and 21 minutes. AWESOME! I feel great too, unlike previously. I'm super excited to see how it does going forward.

I tried some transcendental meditation, which...apparently people try to market as some secret bullshit where you have to pay a guru a thousand dollars for a "word" but in reality you just...repeat some nonsensical phrase over and over for 20 minutes. Really simple haha. It actually worked out great, I HATED all other types of meditation, but this one was simple enough. I'll have to keep trying it out longer and see what results I get.

For some reason I've been feeling more hungry lately, like I just want to eat and eat. Seems a bit odd, but something to think about.

Yep, that's about it. Nothing else exciting going on lol. Time to focus!

Feeling Like Crap is No Fun, Let's Fix That

Adjusting my sleep

Man, I have to say that perhaps 5 hours isn't working so well for me any more. It could be something different, but waking up yesterday I felt like I was smacked by a truck and I was NOT productive at all. I eventually felt so crappy I just had to take a nap for an hour and a half before work lol.

Today I did 6 hours and I feel back to my usual motivated and excited self. I've already written two articles today within an hour and  a half and I'm excited to do more! It sucks because I'd love that extra hour, but if getting up an hour earlier causes me to LOSE a day then that isn't very useful to me.

So, about that new schedule

So I am coming up on the end of my first week of the new "schedule". Overall I feel good about it, however the timing was a bit off on me thinking I could squeeze in learning, challenges, and busy work towards the final hour and a half before I go to work. It ended up that I take a bit more to wake up, mostly due to feeling so crappy in the morning lately. Also I was extremely non-productive feeling for a bit. I still got stuff done and I'm happy with what I accomplished though.

I think next week will be better, as I'll be going back to 6 hours which worked great before. I still want to have time allotted to actual learning via reading etc, so I may put some of that into my days off, or just cut down a coding day or creative day and turn it into a learning day.

I'll keep working through this schedule for the month of April, and then I may try out something where I block an entire week to coding, a week to creative, a week to...etc. Overall, the more I can chunk things together and focus on something the better and faster I can do it. That is my thinking with eventually doing a whole week of writing at a time. Who knows maybe I can eventually get to where I'll do like a whole month of content creation and just queue up a ton of stuff, and then I can do a month of project work etc. That's all future thinking of course.

Shitty Job is Shitty

I've been getting more and more annoyed at work. Perhaps I am just 100% ready to get out of there and move on to the next part of my life. Yea definitely lol. If I look back at my goals from the end of December, I really did want to be in the position I am in now, looking for jobs at the beginning of May and have something by the end of June so I think I'm still in a good spot, I'm just more impatient than I had planned for.

Oooo, that feelin'!

Lately I have been getting this little excited butterfly feeling in my stomach, because I am so happy about all of the ideas going through my head. I want to do so many things, and I just have to let time play out a bit and keep doing the right activities but I really am interested to see where everything is headed. I want to help people out with my Youtube and blog, and I have over 100 ideas brainstormed out, but I just need to get them written and recorded!

I'm almost really excited about all of the people I have been meeting in the Slack groups and Gitter chats that I've joined lately. The programming community is a really great one to be a part of, and I think I made the right choice to make the shift away from gaming even if I did really enjoy it and did a great job in that space.

Anyhow, today was a word vomit so I'll stop there. See you around!

Feeling Recharged and Moving Full Steam Ahead

Better Organization

Now that I am back into work mode, I'm feeling really good about the progress I
get done in the mornings. I have split out the large sections of my main kanban
board into smaller trello boards such as things I want to learn, my money
project, website, and personal fun stuff including dreams goals want to get
stuff.

Overall I like this a lot better, I'm still adding small tasks and working
through them with time tracking via the kanban flow, but now I have it organized
with mostly "category" sections that link out, and as I go through the week I'll
refer to the more detailed board to pull tasks, since there are quite a lot and
those need to also be individually organized.

I've gone and done it!

I ended up splurging finally and buying an iPhone6+. I had been thinking about
doing it for quite a while and it was bothering me. I thought I would be able to
split it onto payments but apparently I read wrong, and that isn't available for
prepaid plans. Oh well, I bought it in full for like 900 bucks after the case,
and it is unlocked so w/e. Great thing there is I can always sell it later for
an upgrade since it isn't carrier locked.

Job soon maybe?

I'm feeling pretty good about my recent meeting with Lance from Big Astronaught.
He is saying he should be able to bring me on in a week or two depending on the
go ahead from a big client of his. I'm hoping to learn a ton about meteor by
working with him on that.

Making dem connections yo!

I've also got a chat scheduled with Saron tomorrow about ideas for helping
newbies like myself and people who have gone through my self learning struggle
to find content easier and not get so lost figuring out what to learn etc.

Overall, I've been happy with the amount of interactiveness I've had with other
website and content creators so far. I look forward to meeting more people like
that, such as Linda from CodeBuddies.org website who I've been chatting with as
well. I'm finally starting to feel like I'm going to be in a position to be a
big help to the community, especially once I get some of my content rolling out
this month.

Easily distracted

The only thing right now I find that might be slowing me down is that I do
easily get distracted by jumping into these chats and what not. I've never been
huge on facebook and twitter, but the live chats are addicting and even though
I'm making some good friends and connections I'll have to monitor myself and
make sure I don't let it distract me too bad if I am in the middle of some
pomodoro cycles etc.

So, other than wishing I had 10x more time to get things done I am happy with my
progress so far, and feel that it's only going to get better soon. See you
around!

I'm so inspired now!

Holy crap, I got an amazing response from the video that I put up a couple of days ago. Over 100 comments from my awesome viewers who are interested in programming and are still interested in following the channel. Overall I am really inspired and honored! I am ready to put out some helpful content now (more so than I was before).

I'm planning out my strategy for April today and tomorrow, which mostly involves more balance, as well as more focus for what I am doing.

Even though I didn't really have any interest in doing anything exciting by normal standards during this time off period, I certainly feel good about it. I was able to relax, and get some perspective. In the future I don't know if I'll need a whole week off. 4-5 days is more than enough it feels like. I'm just getting really antsy to get back to working on projects, especially now that I'll be taking at least 1 day each week to relax.

I started listening to a new podcast, "Ear Biscuits" by Rhett and Link from Good Mythical Morning and was surprised. I thought it was just a comedy cast, but it's actually an inspirational interview podcast with successful youtube and internet names. Really great stuff!

I don't have too much else to talk about really. I feel like I am in the calm before the storm because I'm really dreaming forward about what my Youtube, blog, and career have in store within the next year. I have a feeling things are going to get really exciting.

See you next time!

Taking time off is harder than I would have thought

Hey everyone! So far I am enjoying my days off. I went to see the final episode of The Hobbit (which was...okayish). I've been doing my best to relax and just be present. I still keep thinking about programming and how much I want to get things done, but I am gradually getting a bit more perspective and when I go back into it I think I'll be much more focused which was the goal of taking this time away.

I honestly don't know what to do with myself. I spent some time browsing artwork, and added a lot of new desktop backgrounds which was fun. I also have been playing around and practicing with memorization and speed reading. Other than that, I am sitting around pondering stuff or chatting with friends online.

I created a video as well, which would mark the first video in FOUR MONTHS for my channel. Check it out if you like:


Well, that's it really. I want to get better at meditating and relaxing, so I'll try to keep working on that. On monday I want to spend time doing some planning and really strategize so that going back into my next month I'll really be prepared to hit it hard with some laser focus.

Talk to you later!

Enlightenment?

So, day 2 of my 1 week "break." Not quite sure how it will go, but I can say it
is difficult! I am doing my best to not think about trying to work on a project.
I do notice I tense up quite a bit when my mind wanders to the idea that I
should be getting stuff done, but I am working on being as meditative and
relaxed about doing nothing as I can.

Instead of listening to podcasts all day and while going to work, I tried to
just relax and be mindful of everything, listen to the cars pass by, and enjoy
the warmth and the wind from outside. Sounds all woo woo, but honestly I could
feel the stress and tension slowly fade a bit that I would normally be
experiencing.

Clearly my super high velocity 80 hour a week studying was catching up. I didn't
think about it so much, but I'll be sure to plan out the next few weeks of
crunch time to better account for recharge time. I've decided I'll only work on
the super important stuff for 6-8 pomodoros in the morning, and always be done
with that stuff by 10am, at which time I cannot do any more and I can free
myself to chill a bit and exercise or check email / chat with people.

I'll iterate on this as necessary, but right now I'm settling on 4 days of
coding time, 2 days for creative work, and 1 "free" day to do whatever I want,
whether it's a different side project, or just hanging out with buddies etc...as
long as it doesn't involve my normal "work"

I'm also a bit upset about a recent change at work. From now on, anyone with ANY
electronic device will be instantly terminated. WTF? So that means no more
relaxing laptop time in between calls to read and study. Whatever, just means I
REALLY need to push hard to get a job ASAP. I can't do that crap for long.

Well, let's see how I feel after a few more days of forced vacation. I don't
really know what to do with myself to be honest, but I'm hoping I can enjoy it
and really let my mind go from the "I HAVE TO GET SHIT DONE" mode that has
started to wear me out after 4 months straight.

Don't be such a perfectionist

No Organization this time, just a mess of thoughts

Yesterday I had a phone call with a guy who has been done about 20 or so tech interviews recently, and has been doing dev for a bit over a year. I wanted to just bounce some thoughts and hopefully get rid of some stress I've been building up about my learning experience so far.

Overall I felt it was a really helpful chat, and it helped me calm down a bit about my progress. Here are the main takeaways that I pulled from it that will apply to myself:
 * Don't be a perfectionist.
I've been trying to be amazing at everything I do, and I've been trying to do EVERYTHING. For example, it is always pushed as very important to focus on testing apps in production and making that a big part of what you do, however from my perspective of learning and just needing to build things, I was stressing way too hard over it.

Right now Meteor testing is extremly new, and there aren't a lot of resources on it. It ties into the next point which is the Pereto principle.

This is something I always go back to thinking about in everything I do. It applies very heavily here though, because I have to start focusing on important stuff that produces the majority of the results. The perfectionist stuff like getting TDD perfect even in my little toy apps was taking it a bit long. From now on I am going to just work as hard as I can to just SHIP apps, and then iterate over them as I go on.

He suggested I start reaching out to people on Angel list and Hired.com, and to keep my portfolio / description short and honest. I'll reviese some things and start putting out some apps.

I also took some time to really learn some Javascript fundamentals based on his previous suggestion, but I'll definitely keep learning more about them as he was saying that is what helped him to get his jobs so far. Things like Hoisting, Closures, .this, lexical scoping, prototypical inheritance etc.

At first I was feeling  a little bit like I was messing up by switching focus over to just Javascript / Meteor instead of continuing with Rails but I honestly just REALLY like Javascript and front end stuff. I like being f ull stack which Meteor allows, and I think in 1-2 years Meteor is really going to blow up more than it already is so I'm okay with it even if it means I have a few less job opportunities in the short term.

I've decided now also that I have to reduce the amount of time I spend working on stuff. By that, I mean I have to have forced breaks of time or days to completely change focus. I need to do stuff like go outside, exercise, do some cooking / baking, play video games, be social...stuff like that. I can still be super hardcore about my learning and like "bootcamp" mode but, even looking over one of the bootcamp curriculums they have a mandatory 1 week break in the middle.

I'll plan something out for either this coming week or the first week of March. I think it will help me a lot to reorganize my thoughts and spend more time doing the other things I wanted to work on like speed reading, memorization, exercise, learning baking, and what not.

Other than that, I've started on my Money app project. In order to focus on the important stuff I deleted out the Testing stuff I was trying to learn and having issues with, and I'm just going small bit by bit. I got the Materialize framework added in, with a navbar, a basic login (I'll style a custom one later) and now I'm making sure my data schema is correct and that I know how to update things from the console.

Well, this post was a bit rushed and disorganized in comparison but I just had to get some thoughts out. I do want to clean up some of my note organization later so I can be more detailed on what I am learning etc. Well, that's it for now. Time to bounce!

JUST BUILD WEBSITES! - Thanks Chris...

What have I learned?

Whew, so I've been trying the 4 hour thing for a couple of days and I believe it might be too little. I kept getting quite tired and needing to take a nap as I wasn't able to keep my eyes open sitting up. I decided to go back to 5 hours of sleep, which was working great for me. That still gives me 6-7 hours of time in the morning to do projects and learn.

I was planning on spending all week on Javascript fundamentals and challenges, but I actually feel that I've got the concepts down that I was looking for. Even though the past 2 days weren't too productive as I needed some relax time, I was still able to get the knowledge I was looking for quicker than I had expected.

Roadblocks?

My big roadblock right now is doubt. Doubt with myself on whether or not I am focusing on the right things. For example, if I were to look back and give myself advice I might just say, hey man begin building projects right away. Don't spend so much time on "book learning". On the other hand however, I do feel a lot more comfortable with important concepts and fundamentals that will make me a better coder and be able to produce better work.

The other doubt I have is if my skills are where they need to be. You could call that imposter syndrome, and on hand I KNOW that I am at least at a junior level or even a good bit above...but I still have to be able to prove that. I guess it just goes back to what Chris Coyier always says, "JUST BUILD WEBSITES!" haha.

What am I going to do next?

Just looking at this from a logical perspective, I really have to get to building some actual apps. That will be the best way for me to learn going forward. I still need to polish up my website as well, so I believe that I should split some time between working on that and putting work into building apps.

I do have several people I am talking to about trying to pair up with and help on their stuff. Anything I can do that involves actual coding now is probably top priority. The only other thing I am now somewhat torn on is if I should do projects in Rails or in Meteor. It's possible that will be determined by if I get one of the two Meteor jobs I applied for, because if not it's Rails for sure as the job opportunities there are MUCH more bountiful, and then I could always do Meteor on the side once I get a job.

I have a chat today with the guy who has been interviewing for a while. A meetup with Useful.io guys on Monday, and I met the CEO of Grok at our local meetup last night who told me he was interested in chatting so I feel good about the networking side of things. Now to just prove that I am worth hiring!

My current project idea that I have been thinking about since before I even began learning programming, is still to convert my huge excel money sheet into an app so perhaps I'll start working on that. I keep thinking it might be more work than I can do in a few weeks but on the other hand maybe not if I just put in the core stuff. Essentially it will be some data entry with tags / categories attached to each entry, and then it adds things together to get a total. Not too complex if you word it like that. I think it is an app idea that has a ton of room to grow, which is why I am holding off but meh.

My other thought was I can start on it, and for individual concepts I need to learn I can make a quick throwaway / toy app to test that bit of functionality while getting the hang of building new projects and making sure I understand the whole process from zero to boilerplate to completion.

Well, too many thoughts and not enough time I think. I need to put some of this stuff into practice, so I'm going to stop there. See you next time!

Networking like a boss!

Last two days have been great for solidifying my learning of Meteor. I finished
up the Discover Meteor book, and posted up the projects I've done for my
portfolio. Other than that, I was able to schedule another initial phone
interview for this coming Monday, so I am excited there.

Yesterday was quite awesome in my opinion. I found some great resources by going
through community links and watching some Q&A vids from Josh Owens Meteor Club.
He has a Slack group, which I joined into and the authors from some of the books
I've got are in there as well.

I was able to make a few contacts and have been chatting with Josh himself, and
might even do some pairing with him on one of his projects. I set up a call with
another guy to discuss some Javascript concepts, as he just went through about
20 interviews and so I figured I could get some insight into how that process
looks.

Overall I am pushing very hard to reach out to as many people as I can because
networking is how the world works when it comes to getting a job! I'm doing my
best to give back also in any way I can. I am always offering help to noobies
from various chats, as I know that what goes around comes around.

I've decided for this next week I'll try to work on my deeper knowledge and
understanding of Javascript itself. I want to really be sure I can understand
the important concepts like .this, closures, objects, how to do OOP in it,
prototypical inheritence vs classical..all of that stuff. I get it enough to
code things and solve problems but I want to be able to explain all of the deeper concepts
things easily.

I'm going to watch a few videos on Javascript, read through Javascript the good
parts, and also "You don't know JS" series. On top of that, I'll be doing a
couple of code wars and exercism.io challenges. I think that should put me in a
good position overall. I'll be able to do all of that by the end of the week,
and if I finish it up I'll most likely work on finishing up some articles and
book reading on using Velocity the Meteor testing framework.

That's it for now, really. I'm looking forward to seeing where some of these new
connections will lead! Talk to you in a few days :)

Reaching Peak Performance

What did I learn?

So my learning of Meteor.js has been very comprehensive so far. I've completed all of the Evented Mind screencasts, read through the entire official manual, skimmed the docs a few times, and almost fully completed the Discover Meteor book. I read through some community stuff and looked through various articles also so I have a pretty good feel for the framework and where it is going. Overall I can say I am extremly happy to be learning it.

There are some things that I'll have to drill down to and practice more to fully learn, but at the moment I am pretty sure for anything I need to do I can figure out where to look and how to get the answer. That is the big part of learning a new language or framework. Memorization comes later with practice and building practical apps, and troubleshooting issues.

How do I feel?

I've been taking L-Arganine and ZMA, along with some low-carb protein to complement my exercising that I've been doing lately. I am not sure if it is that stuff helping, or the fact that I've been running and working out catching up finally but I feel great! I was able to do a full sprint to the end of the block before getting winded, and my recovery-walk was much shorter and I was able to sprint through the entire trail which I usually have to do like 3-4 run/walk iterations.

On top of that, bumping down to 4 hours of sleep I am actually getting out of bed MUCH easier. Perhaps I was just waking up at a weird cycle for the 5 hour mark. I did take a 5 minute boredom nap at work, and felt a little drowsy for a bit, but then got up and moved around and I'm refreshed already.

Going forward...

I think I'll give some time into learning Velocity the upcoming testing framework for Meteor, and also probably go through the Bulletproof Meteor course. That should give me an all-around great understanding of the important parts of building any Meteor app going forward.

I want to make a from scratch app now, or at least copy a concept on my own once I am done with some of this. It makes it much easier to learn when I am not copying code. Currently I will read up on a section, and peek at what the next block of code will do, then try to write it out myself before actually looking over the example code. This is helping me learn much faster and solidify the concepts.

That's it for now though. See you next time!

One Track Mind

Productivity++

Dang, my learning motivation is top notch these past two days. I was able to
blast out 20 pomodoros yesterday, and another 13 today before work. I've been
working through the Discover Meteor book, and then I found a great post from
Javascript is Sexy called "learn Meteor the right way" and it helped me to get a
good list of resources to work through, with some good discounts one being the
book, and another is an amazing screencast series from EventedMind.

Lance just asked me to make a simple leaderboard app, but I have gone beyond
that. I've got a pretty decent reddit clone going from following the book
examples, including login. I also have a good overview of the workings of Meteor
from reading through the Docs and the EventedMind screencasts do a great job of
explaining how things work internally.

Overall I really enjoy Meteor, and look forward to developing some apps in it. I
actually feel that it would be a great framework for the money tracking app idea
that I had because of the real-time and responsiveness of it as well as the
ability to easily port to iOS / Android.

Exercise

I have been feeling better and better, and now that it is warming up I went for
a bike ride again and running is much more enjoyable. I've added a protein shake
with kale / spinach to my day in order to augment the working out I've been
doing. I was considering doing some Insanity or P90X but not sure yet. For now I
am feeling good with the decent exercise I am getting.

Sleep

I thought of bumping down to 4 hours of sleep for the crunch time of this next
month because I am super serious about getting this job or SOME job very soon.
Once I get one I can bump back up to 5-6 and be okay with it.


If I do get a remote job, I definitely would consider checking out working at
the Geekdom co-working space. I think that would help keep me sane and able to
meet other people, which I was really missing when working from home doing
Youtube stuff for 4 years straight.

Well, that's all I can think about right now. The only thing on my mind is
finishing up this book and screencasts so I can feel really good with my Meteor
knowledge. See you next time!

Time to learn Meteor.js

Hi there! So I had good success with getting interviews past 2 days. I had a really good
face-to-face with Matthew at Test Double, and was told I would be a good fit for
their culture. Today however he said they are looking for more experienced devs.
Overall I'm okay with that, just means I need to build more projects. It's
pretty well known that it is tough for juniors to get spots, and they are a top
notch company.

I met with the CTO of big asronaut today also, and he wants me to learn and
build an app in Meteor, and could bring me on as an apprentice. I wouldn't be
making much money, but it would be akin to an internship so that could possibly
work out...and I REALLY like Meteor.js. I believe it might just be the future of
the web...not that Rails is going anywhere. We will see.

Other than that, not too many interesting things going on. I was focusing on
learning TDD by going through the workshop at upcase. I'll be putting it on hold
and changing my week's priority to building a Meteor app for now, as that will
be my best bet for now at moving into a better position.

In about an hour of time, I've already created a simple todo app in Meteor so that is
promising. Here it is http://colby-todo-woohoo.meteor.com

I ordered a 27" 1440 monitor. I've begun realizing that having 3 screens isn't
so useful as a programmer, and in fact is just distracting. I'll be better
suited by swapping workspaces to look things up, and I can use a 2nd monitor to
view training videos or a live preview of a site I am working on, but otherwise
it isn't so useful to have more than just my main screen with as much going on
there as I can fit.

I joined up with a Facebook group / google hangouts group that are focusing on
The Odin Project and am tryin to lend my help. I think that will be a good way
for me to contribute and see what problems newer learners are having so that I
can use that knowledge in the future to make learning resources, which
ultimately is what I would like to do.

I still am torn on if I should create a new domain other than colbycheeze.com.
Perhaps switch to ColbyWilliams.com, or make something centered around what I'd
like to teach, or what topics I like to write about. Something around the topic
of productivity + web development. Well, I'm bad at locking down those decisions
so for now I'll just put it on my "to think about" list.

Super Learning is Fun

It feels like a lot longer period of time than it actually has. I am glad I
decided to write these every two days, because I already am having trouble
remembering what has transpired. Possibly part of it has been due to my new
schedule at work and being transferred to a night team with a ton of downtime.

I spend that time doing coding challenges, reading articles, and tweaking my
website. I've been able to get my portfolio page completed, and I am feeling
good about how it was coded. I put together a local data store with yaml in
order to keep the code 'DRY'. The rest is just a simple template that has some
fancy schmancy cards and a mouseover shadow. Fun stuff!

All I need to do now is get a cool front page set up. I still have to figure out
how I want to do that...bit of a block there. I could do something like a big
full page picture of me doing something interesting, with icon links to my blog,
twitter, etc... That might be a good start (or even end).

I've been working on finding companies to work for, and have gotten a call from
a recruiter that is looking to place me locally. I've also got another call
lined up for another remote company. I would love to be a remote worker because
I am so used to that environment already, and it would be nice to have the
freedom to move around etc.

I spent a few hours today trying to get the League Junkies Vagrant setup working
on my machine and just had zero success. I swear everything I try to do meets
huge walls haha. Even things that should be simple. It's funny too because I
had Sashi working with me on Slack the whole time. No worries though, I'll be up
and running soon enough.

Super Learning

I've been getting through this super learner programing and really enjoying it.
It is getting into speed reading, but this one is a bit different. They focus
more on learning how to memorize things as a baseline for learning to speed
read. You create markers from words as you read through which are associated
with images and animations in your head, so that your recall is boosted
dramatically.

I've been practicing memorization techniques, peripheral vision stretching, and
overdoing the amount of WPM I can read each day. Hopefully I can get good enough
with the memory stuff to rapidly learn all of these new frameworks and get
really good with knowing where to look for the various components of each
system.

Overall, I'm feeling good about where I am headed. I just want to keep building
awesome things and get shifted into the next phase of life. Next chat, we should
have an update on how some of my plans are evolving for the rest of the month!

I might need to recharge the batteries

So after finishing up all of the Euler projects and filling out the massive
questionnaire for Big Astronaut, I sit here eagerly awaiting feedback. Also I am
pumped to look for other companies which would be fun to work for.

Stressed? Or maybe I just need to recharge

I didn't do too much today productivity-wise...I guess it's been about 3 months
since I've given myself a day off to just relax. Not that I relaxed today, I
just stressed over not being in the mood to do stuff. Maybe that is a sign I
should relax haha. Honestly I don't even know what I would do at the moment. I
kind of want to go ride my bike, but a cold front blew in again.

I thought about buying a new game, but then I quickly lost interest in that. I
do really want to just build things. Since I am spending so much creative energy
solving problems and learning new things, perhaps the best way for me to
recharge the batteries so to speak would be to look for more social ventures or
physical activities. Before, just watching TV and playing video games was
extremely fulfilling...but maybe because I played really hardcore and
challenging games. Now that my need for challenge is being taken up, I've got to
balance that out.

Planning and prioritizing

Anyhow, I did a bit more planning today on what I want to focus on going
forward. I really have a bit of a design block on how I want my blog header to look,
and how to design my landing page / portfolio / about sections.

I was thinking perhaps I should bump up the priority of polishing some of my
existing projects, and make a card view for the portfolio page. That would make
the most amount of sense now that I am putting myself out for potential
employers.

My new idea...it's a good one!

I had a new idea for a "capstone" project to do instead of the money tracking
thing. There are SOOO many learning resources and websites popping up now days
for getting into web development, that it is hard to even decide where to go or
which one best suits what you need to do.

I learn about a new resource almost every couple of days at LEAST. The problem
gets even worse when some of the hide content behind pay walls, and you don't
know if paying 50 bucks a month to access it is even any better than the free
resources.

So, the idea would be to make some sort of review / content aggregation site to
bring together all of the learning resources and categorize them based on what
you want to learn and your own learning style. So people would vote and review
on the best learning resource for certain topics. Maybe Codecademy is best
for...learning basic Ruby syntax, but then you want to learn HTML/CSS and
everyone has voted up Code School, and then Michael Hartl for Ruby on Rails
beginners...anyways those are examples not my opinions but that is the point.
Who knows? I think that would be extremly useful to me to see a spot where there
are discussions and what not based around that.

The site could be similar to glassdoor for example, just people who have
experience with the resource giving the knowledge so you can make better
decisions on how to spend your time.

Anyway that's what I've got for now, see you in a few days!

I feel like I am getting close! (to being hired)

My website is beginning to look a lot better. I did a redesign on many elements,
and I feel pretty good about it. The only thing I still want to improve is
getting a better looking header / hero image at the top.

Finishing up the Test trails for Upcase was way harder than I thought. Just
wrapping my head around the code wasn't so easy, as they give literally no good
examples, and just say "here do this thing".

I was able to get through the fundamentals section, but only through the first
part of the test doubles. I am getting the hang of it now, but it just took a
while. Also, another reason I didn't finish it up, was that I ended up spending
some time asking questions about getting jobs from someone in my Ruby slack
group.

I ended up tweeting out a few people, sending some e-mails, and applying for a
couple of jobs. I got a call from someone local here that said they may have a
Jr spot for me at Rackspace, and they want me to come in on Tuesday to chat, so
that is awesome!

I also applied for a remote position at Big Astronaut, and they sent me this
freaking massive questionnaire covering everything from Ruby, Rails, Javascript,
HTML, Git, and Agile practices. Wow, ridiculous haha. I've already spent 6 1/2
hours filling some of the sections out because I had to look a few things up,
and some of the questions needed to be answered a bit more in depth. So far the
front end questions have been the longest and hardest, maybe because that is
where some of my weak points lie?

I was extremely exhausted yesterday, and ended up taking a mid day 5 hour nap
haha. I wonder if it is in part because of my picking up on the running and
exercise. Since my roommate James has done enough of the research on the
various supplements, I just bought about 80 bucks worth of things to help out
like protein and some other things. I'll probably start to look into more
workout things I can do, so that I can be more well rounded in my exercise.

So, yea there's that! I'm looking forward to sending off this tech question
thing, and hopefully getting some responses from the feelers I send out to
companies. Of course I'll be working to improve my portfolio as soon as I can,
now that I will have people reviewing the work.

So, until next time...peace out!

Planning out the Month of March

I already feel really good about the two articles that I've written. I got a ton
of retweets for my learning resources article that I posted also, so that is
great. Now to just sustain that sort of quality weekly for a few years! Haha...

I wrote 2000 words for my productivity article, and it took me about 2.5 hours
to complete. I am sure I can write future stuff a bit faster, but I did pause
quite a bit going through it, and I'm a bit sloppy at the moment.

I've decided I'll go ahead and give the Geekdom space a 1 month trial this
coming month, so I'll go in tomorrow around noon to check it out. My goal for
now would be to go in about twice a week. In all it should cost me 90 dollars,
so I would hope to get value out of it from networking, otherwise I'd just
cancel.

I got stuck a bit on the Fibonacci recursive project, and took a bit longer on
the merge sort than I wanted. Just shows I need to do some more practice and
katas so I'll be completing a couple a week going forward until I can do them in
less than an hour np.

I've been planning out the month of March as best as I can but it is very
difficult to forsee that far out! This is something I want to get better at for
sure. Project and goal planning for me is hard enough a day or two out haha.

So far I have gotten about a week worth figured out, and then just a broad "do
personal project" I can drill down further on it, but I don't know if I'll be
spending more time working on League Junkies or not, and then I'd have to choose
a project to focus on. Also, it might be a good idea for me to pick some concept
projects to "copy" which show my competence and try to complete them in about a
week each so i can have portfolio stuff to show.

Hard choices man!

Resumes will start going out this month, so I also want to be sure and polish up
my Github and portfolios as much as I can. Going forward, doing tasks focused on
getting a job will probably be the big thing for me. I just need to keep that in
mind, because it is easy to just focus on learning more as there is so much
knowledge to still obtain, however I am effective enough at the moment to
contribute to a team imo.

Peak Productivity

Progress!

These past two days I have made a considerable amount of progress on my website.
I was able to complete enough of the blog to be quite presentable and start
putting up content. It felt good to be able to do so much without as many
roadblocks. I did hit one bump with a template issue, but I resolved it by doing
an if statement within the view, isntead of breaking out into two templates.
Wasn't as clean as I'd like but it works.

For the rest of this week (next two days) I'll be focusing on writing content. I
was able to polish up my Tmux/Vim article a good amount, put together a recap of
building the blog, and also posted up my monthly recap of learning web dev.

I downloaded screenflow and GIFBrewery so that I can edit up some screencasts
and gifcasts, which I was looking forward to, so that should be good fun!

Becoming more productive?

Looking at my time spent report, I've been getting about 5~ pure pomodoros
completed each morning this week, which as been great. That was all that I could
complete on my total day off last week. Overall it just shows how exhausting it
is to work in such a focused state for so long.

I'll have to begin working out more in order to gain more stamina, as throwing
more hours into the equation at this point won't help. I've been exercising a
decent amount now, but I could certainly step it up. Once the weather gets
better I'll be able to do some biking and that will be awesome.

Future Planning

Now that my website is *mostly* complete, other than a pretty landing page and
cleaning up my portfolio, I can switch my focus back into learning the more
heavy duty stuff. My focus for next week is going to be on TDD, as I plan to use
pure TDD in all projects going forward.

I'll be trying to plan out for the entire next month at the beginning of next
week, and get as much of an estimate on what I can accomplish from there. I am
really happy with being able to practice my time estimates through my Kanban
board. I think I'll do a screencast or post on how I organize that as well soon.

Well, that's all the time I have for now. See you in two days!

Preparing for Short Talks = Harder Than It Sounds

Preparing

My talk was a bit more difficult than I had thought it would be. Trying to cram all of the knowledge that I wanted to share into a 10 minute time window was very difficult. I would certainly choose a less technical, and more of just a showy talk subject for a 5-10 window "lightning" talk.

The good news, was that the other speaker didn't show up so what ended up happening was I got the chance to talk about Vim and Tmux for about 45 minutes which was awesome! I went into a lot more detail, and answered a lot of questions as well.

Progress

I didn't get QUITE as far in my website as I had wanted to yesterday. It felt like I really didn't make a large amount of progress in terms of pomodoros in general. Honestly, with my schedule shift and having the 6-7 hours in the morning I have been quite productive and able to get a lot done without needing the 2 full days off. I don't feel terrible about not getting 12 hours of pure progress done, but I would like to get a day where I can pull that off.

I met with Sashi with LeagueJunkies and he gave me an overview of the website, and the technology being used to run it. It is way more involved than I had first thought, as he is essentially building Facebook for League of Legends players. It will be interesting to try and refactor tests into a completely untested code base, especially since I have yet to do a full project of my own with testing. I'll be focusing on as much TDD learning in the coming weeks as I can squeeze in.

For my personal website, things are pretty much coming together. I've finally gotten the framing complete. Next I'll have to focus on getting my typography and color scheme the way that I want it. There is still a good amount left to do after that, such as small tweaks to sizing, various features I want for my blog, and overall polish. Oh, and let's not forgot making sure everything is fully responsive for viewing on different screens!

I wrote my first actual article for the blog today, in order to coincide with the talk I did last night. It is a list of advice for learning Vim and some resources that I used in order to gain competence as well as links to setup and my dotfiles that I finally got backed up today with RCM.

Need more podcasts!

I am getting to the point where I have no more podcasts to listen to. So far I have listened to every single Ruby Rogues, Code Newbies, Entreprogrammers, Ruby 5, and a very large majority of The Freelancers show, Javascript Jabber. I still have a fair amount of Giant Robots podcast to go through however after that I am not familiar with any other really high quality ones to listen to so I'll have to do some research on that.

Going forward

Overall, I'm happy with my progress while at the same time I am very impatient on moving into my next role. Hopefully with all of the work I am doing to follow best practices I'll be able to slide into a great company that emulates that so I can learn quickly over the next year or two.

That's it for today, see you on Sunday!

The new website design is slowly coming together

Designing with CSS is like trudging through mud

My website design is coming along slowly but surely. It takes way longer to do things, which when I begin them seem like it would be very quick. It took me about 2 hours to get all of the kinks out of positioning my top nav bar for my website, due to some positioning issues and pixels coming out of seemingly nowhere lol. Here is what the current iteration looks like.


I now have to wireframe the footer section, and get the content area to have an aside, or widget pane. Once the basic framework is done, I can start tweaking the typography and coloring of the page. Overall it's close, but I definitely have a ways to go. I am hoping to have it about 90% done by the end of the week (that 10% being the part that will take the longest if you know what I mean)

Productivity

Yesterday I was able to complete about 12 pomodoros. Towards the end of the day I was a little confused on where the rest of the time went haha. After about 12 hardcore focused sessions my brain just gets fried I suppose.

The major win was just learning more about how the Bourbon family of tools works, and some additional CSS styling gotchas. Today I have a lot of chores I need to get done, as well as preparing for my talk so I'll be a bit scattered. I spent several hours this morning viewing Upcase videos on workflow, Tmux, and Vim in order to get some ideas for my talk.

That just goes to show that by teaching and doing talks you will become a better developer, as it forces you to become knowledgable in the subject you are presenting. That said, I'll really think hard about what I want to learn and then make that a topic that I present on in the future!

Well, that's it really for today. We will see how the design is shaping up in a couple of days. See you then!

Web Design is Difficult for my Developer Mindset

Productivity

My new schedule began yesterday, and I feel really good about it. Since the majority of my productivity is in the mornings, having a night schedule allows me to just go straight to bed after doing a bit of reading when I get home, and then now I have 6-7 hours to do personal projects and learning as opposed to before where I was getting in 3-4, and then coming home to veg out for 4 hours.

By switching down to 5 hours of sleep I was feeling a little groggy during the day at first, however I am already getting used to it I believe. I may even be able to bump it down to 4 hours in a few weeks. I was actually considering an all day "hackathon" for myself for one of my two days off in order to just try and get all of my website up and running like I want it, and maybe even a few bits of content. I would sleep for sure, for like 4 hours but the idea would be to shut out any other distractions and go all out on that one project.

Roadblocks

I had a LOT more trouble than I had predicted as I began trying to get some basic styling done on my website. I honestly didn't even know where to start, and on top of that I had a ton of errors that I ran into along the way with trying to get syntax highlighting set up for the code, as well as getting the Markdown to generate properly.

I ended up going with Redcarpet for the Middleman blog, however I wasn't able to get Rogue to auto generate CSS. I finally figured out that I could just go download my own which worked out alright. Now I am going to have to go in and individually style up the entire set of elements ranging from the text, to headings, bullets, tables, etc. That will be a huge task for me, being that I haven't EVER done or even seen a page styled like that.

Due to my lack of knowledge there I took a step back and I'm going through the Upcase Sass fundamentals, as well as a workshop with some interesting videos discussing "Design for Developers". I've already learned a ton just from the small amount I've gone through, such as sketching out designs, typography, and other concepts that I was really fuzzy on. I grabbed a couple of suggested books that I may flip through to see if they would help, but honestly I really just want to see a well designed website that I can read through and copy some elements from for the moment.

Going Forward

I met up with a guy working on a new website in pure rails that is willing to mentor me a bit and let me work on the site with him. I'm going to have a call with him tomorrow, and see how everything would work out. Anything I can do to meet with other developers and get help is great for me.

Overall, I'm mostly looking forward to getting my website finished up so that I can begin working on a capstone project, or decide to contribute to an open source. I haven't decided which way I want to go yet. There are so many things that I CAN and/or WANT to do and learn, but I have to focus on the tasks that will give me the most leverage in finding a job now, and then I can continue learning topics which I have on my radar, while getting paid!

Public speaking, Blogging, and Networking Oh My!

Writing a talk is a new thing for me. I have over 1400 Youtube videos created,
and the process was always extremely simple. I just write out a small outline,
and read off each bullet point by expanding and free-form talking over it.

Now I have to keep several things in mind, such as what the audience is going to
see, and what time limit I am constrained to. Also what is the most important
information? It definitely is a new thing, but I am happy to be on the
challenge.

I started off by doing the outline format that I generally do with my videos,
and then kind of spoke through parts of the talk out loud, but then I thought
maybe I should write a bit of script...meh. I just am not a script person. It
feels so dirty.

Instead I think I'll just keep the outline, and time myself once or twice doing
the whole talk to make sure I am meeting the time limit while also covering
everything that I need to. If anything, I may just do a screencast version
beforehand, that way I am as prepared as I can be.

So, I went to the most recent meetup and found that I may be able to get in a
good talk for next month at the big web dev one. I'll definitely put forward
that idea, unless I come up with a different idea. I do notice that from what
I've seen, speakers stick to one talk and then iterate on it in multiple
settings so perhaps I'll do that. It would be cool to speak at one of the really
big conferences later.

I've finished up my resume, updated my LinkedIn, and got some basic styling done
for my new website / blog. I still have a lot of work to do there, but my goal
is to really have it at least functional by next week. I did take some time from
that task however to focus on getting this talk right, and also I spent a good
chunk of my usual free time with a friend who is moving and I won't see any
more.

I've been continuing to seek out communities where possible. I joined in on the
chat with #CodeNewbies, and joined RubyNewbies Slack team, as well as
CodeBuddies.org. I was considering posting up on Reddit with an offer to
pair/mentor new coders so that I could learn more by teaching, and if possible
attract someone better than me to be MY mentor. That is the one thing I still
haven't been able to find. I know that I can massively increase my progress if I
can find someone who would be that role for me.

I got a lot of bookmarks organized with really cool resources for learning
programming and various tools etc. I will probably create a resource page for
those things also and I think it will be very useful to other people.

The list of employers that would be great to work for is getting larger. VERY
soon, I believe that I'll start sending out apps to them. I do know that it
would be better if I could get contacts with people within those companies in
order to reference my way in. Perhaps I'll put together a plan to contact and
"stalk" some of them so that I can get in easier

Chances are, I'll wait to finalize the talk until my day off so that I can do it
with full voice. In the mornings, I have to be quiet so as to not wake up my
roommates. I mean, waking up at 3am I'd hate to use my booming talk voice to
practice haha.

For now, I'll work on putting together my portfolio and tying my whole landing
page experience together, and then move on to getting the blog at least
presentable for reading articles. It's such a good feeling to have a lot of
these things come together, although at the same time I know i have such a long
way to go. Good stuff!

That's it for now, see you next time...