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!