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!