Whoa, I feel like so much has happened since my last post and yet it has only been a couple of days! Well, I'll try to summarize and talk about some of the changes I've made to my daily routine.
Alright, so I've discovered some great resources as I generally do from listening to Ruby Rogues podcast daily, as well as some short browsing of Reddit /r/learnprogramming and /r/cscareers, however I picked up on a blog from John Sonmez. He has some great material focused on personal development for programmers, which is a great fit for my style. Most importantly however, was a video from his Youtube which showed how he plans his week, that shows an amazing app called KanbanFlow.
It uses the Pomodoro technique to time activitiesand track them. I picked up and skimmed through a book on the technique called Pomodoro Technique Illustrated. All I can say is...WOW. So, I am really hyperactive and quite ADD...which generally leads to me getting REALLY off topic and unfocused as I jump around to 10 different things at once. I can be reading something, or working on a project and my mind just goes off like a 4th of July Sparkler.
Now, it has been getting more and more clear that in addition to the learning and projects that I am doing, that I will have to put some real effort into networking and meetups in order to boost my chances of getting "in" with a company looking to hire. I've joined a Ruby and a Javascript meetup which I will be visiting today and next week. I'm excited to write about that experience later.
Also, I've enrolled in an Algorithms course via Coursera in order to bust through the tough Data Structures and Algorithms questions that I may get bombarded with in an interview. The great thing about this is that many people wanted to join a study group, so I created a Slack team for this. Hopefully it will be a great way to chat with peers and learn by teaching etc. Not only have I joined a study group on the Coursera course, but also I have one for a group I met on Reddit for learning Ruby on Rails.
As for my TDD learning, I have been cruising through a ton of resources for this because there is just SO much to learn. I've gotten a bit further in the Facebook-rails project, however I got stuck on an error with FactoryGirl associations. Man, my biggest letdown so far with all of this massive learning I've been doing is when I get stuck for hours at a time on something that seems so trivial.
I've decided not to allow myself to continue working on something past 3-4 pomodoros of time (25 minutes each) so that I can move on and work through other problems or do other learning. That way I can come back later with a fresh mind. I've also decided that I will be spending at least 1-2 days working on "Soft Skills" in addition to my usual learning. By this, I mean general skills for boosting myself as a person.
These could include things like, writing my blog posts, reading personal development books, networking, learning skills such as speed reading, and other related concepts. This, I believe will make it possible to boost the effectiveness of all other learning, while building up and multiplying what I am worth to employers or clients.
Well, this was a highly excited and long post so I'll stop by saying that I will soon have a more legit and REAL blog that I am going to begin posting helpful things such as personal development, and structured stuff...whereas here I am mostly just blasting out a public journal of my progress. I will probably continue doing this blast, as it helps me keep track of things on a more dirty granular level, but I REALLY enjoy outputting helpful and lasting content.
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