Monday, February 16, 2015

I Think It's Time to Start Looking for Jobs

I still have quite a lot that I want to learn with Javascript, although for a large part of it I am just sharpening my memorization of various things. The main stuff I probably need to work on is working with Ajax and API etc. Other than that, it's just about looking up what I need to do in documentation etc.

Overall I am pretty sure I'm totally ready for some kind of Jr position at least. I know for a fact that I would be useful to a team, and I really want to join up with a company doing extreme programming / agile practices so I can learn much quicker. I am going to go ahead and push back the Javascript completion schedule until I have finished up my personal site, resume, portfolio etc. This will actually work out better anyhow, since a lot of the javascript projects are front end oriented (obviously) and therefore I can post them up as part of my portfolio.

I have been building a little snake game using Coffeescript at work. I really enjoy writing that instead of Javascript, as it is so much cleaner and it just compiles straight into Javascript anyway!

I've been stuck REAL hard trying to get this stupid Middleman blog set up. It is probably the most difficult thing I have done since I began learning programming. There are so many issues with things not working and it is VERY obscure with very little in the way of how to set it up. If I can't get even a basic page / workflow set up by the end of tomorrow I'm just going to scrap it altogether and say fuck it, I'm doing Wordpress. As much as I hate the idea of doing that...

Most of the work that I've done in the past few days has been around getting the hang of Sass, Javascript, and Coffeescript syntax. I didn't really finish up the test suite for the Javascript project, as I am a bit unsure of how some of it works when I need to do a full integration test or whatever. I'll have to figure that out later also.

Right now I have so many beginning droplets of info on how to do things, but I should probably start on a full on project soon that way I can really get all of the experience put together that I need. I'll probably do something with the personal finance website idea that I had. Basically I'd be converting my excel spreadsheet that I use to track things into an app that someone else could create a login for and use. That would allow me to integrate the rails knowledge, and javascript front end as I have to generate the main report for all of the data that is entered.

I'll have to map out everything, but it shouldn't be a TERRIBLY massive project if I keep it mostly simple, and build out the core features.

I came across a few more podcasts recently, which is great because I have been somewhat running out of episodes to listen to on my other ones. I got pointed to Phaser as a cool 'flash like' game building platform. Overall that's exciting to me, I may have to check it out because I did enjoy building those small games and what not, and now that HTML5 isn't so bad I could probably whip something up in there and have fun with it.

So, all of this time..these past 2-3 months I've refused to let myself do the usual stuff during my 'off-time' such as watching my favorite shows. I KNOW I am committed to this learning, because I haven't even watched The Walking Dead now that it is back on, which I really enjoy. I'll have to let myself marathon it later if I am able to make some great progress. Perhaps once I complete The Odin Project I'll take like a week and just chill out and play games or catch up on tv shows.

One thing that I AM letting myself do tomorrow though, is go on a date with someone I've been chatting with. Should be interesting, but I told her I'm pretty busy and can't devote a lot of time to relationship stuff. More than anything, I just want to move into the next phase of my life with programming and blogging.

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