Web Design is Difficult for my Developer Mindset

Productivity

My new schedule began yesterday, and I feel really good about it. Since the majority of my productivity is in the mornings, having a night schedule allows me to just go straight to bed after doing a bit of reading when I get home, and then now I have 6-7 hours to do personal projects and learning as opposed to before where I was getting in 3-4, and then coming home to veg out for 4 hours.

By switching down to 5 hours of sleep I was feeling a little groggy during the day at first, however I am already getting used to it I believe. I may even be able to bump it down to 4 hours in a few weeks. I was actually considering an all day "hackathon" for myself for one of my two days off in order to just try and get all of my website up and running like I want it, and maybe even a few bits of content. I would sleep for sure, for like 4 hours but the idea would be to shut out any other distractions and go all out on that one project.

Roadblocks

I had a LOT more trouble than I had predicted as I began trying to get some basic styling done on my website. I honestly didn't even know where to start, and on top of that I had a ton of errors that I ran into along the way with trying to get syntax highlighting set up for the code, as well as getting the Markdown to generate properly.

I ended up going with Redcarpet for the Middleman blog, however I wasn't able to get Rogue to auto generate CSS. I finally figured out that I could just go download my own which worked out alright. Now I am going to have to go in and individually style up the entire set of elements ranging from the text, to headings, bullets, tables, etc. That will be a huge task for me, being that I haven't EVER done or even seen a page styled like that.

Due to my lack of knowledge there I took a step back and I'm going through the Upcase Sass fundamentals, as well as a workshop with some interesting videos discussing "Design for Developers". I've already learned a ton just from the small amount I've gone through, such as sketching out designs, typography, and other concepts that I was really fuzzy on. I grabbed a couple of suggested books that I may flip through to see if they would help, but honestly I really just want to see a well designed website that I can read through and copy some elements from for the moment.

Going Forward

I met up with a guy working on a new website in pure rails that is willing to mentor me a bit and let me work on the site with him. I'm going to have a call with him tomorrow, and see how everything would work out. Anything I can do to meet with other developers and get help is great for me.

Overall, I'm mostly looking forward to getting my website finished up so that I can begin working on a capstone project, or decide to contribute to an open source. I haven't decided which way I want to go yet. There are so many things that I CAN and/or WANT to do and learn, but I have to focus on the tasks that will give me the most leverage in finding a job now, and then I can continue learning topics which I have on my radar, while getting paid!