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!