Got the Geekdom membership. Teamwork FTW!

I had a heck of a lot of fun this past week! I spent most of my time at the Geekdom working alongside Andrew and Tim for the Camp Gladiator website wedesign. It does present new challenges of trying to stay productive when being around people that you are working with, but also the ability to collab and figure things out makes it much more interesting.

I learned a lot about Angular and Grunt, although I'd have to really dive in and maybe do a tutorial to get it down 100%. Becoming a member of Geekdom is a good feeling as well, because being up there makes it easy to attend any of the events, and meet other people in the community.

Outside of doing mostly work there, I have been feeling quite exhausted after waking up in the mornings and sometimes sleeping a lot more. I missed / did half of a workout on 2 days so that sucked, but overall from a month of Insanity I can tell I am in way better shape and LOOK a lot better as well. I'm happy with my progress so far, and will continue to work hard going into the next 5 weeks.

That's pretty much it for the recap. I had a lot of high energy work done, but it was pretty dense so there isn't many small things to discuss. I'll be diving into my upcoming plans for my monthly recap.

Networking could be the key

Week 3 of Discpline month

This week was interesting, I had some wins and fails. I'm starting to see a pattern with just about everything taking way longer than I predict for it to. It took me several hours to do the "Why Vim?" video, AND several hours to put together the talk for the Vim/Tmux IDE talk I did this week.

Overall I did some cool stuff however so I can't discredit myself too much. I hosted an online hackathon type of project, and I finished it up enough to display as a portfolio project which is awesome. I did a decent amount of freelance (not near as much as I NEED to do) but I met a great guy after doing the talk and ended up being offered some freelance where I pair with him up at the Geekdom downtown which was a lot of fun.

I ended up missing a day of exercise yesterday after sleeping an additional 5 hours randomly. That was odd, but it happens I guess. I just woke up and could NOT function and passed out. Other than that incident, I've been easily getting 4-5 hours of sleep and feeling amazing.

Even though it hasn't been perfect, this month of doing habits and discipline has been great. I'm really looking forward to solidifying and ramping things up going forward so that I can keep pushing myself and growing.

I'm at a point now where I just need to put in more job apps and get hired, because the only other thing I can do in my learning is just create more apps...so I'm more than 100% capable of getting any job IMO. Now the trick is to convince someone else of that lol.

I may not have to get a job as soon as I had thought if this relationship with the guy I started working with last night goes well, because he has a lot of work and is willing to share.

Overall, I'm happy with my progress and I'm learning a ton. I REALLY want to ramp things up even further, and get great at things like React as well. I may be jumping into some Angular as I help on this other project which is fine as also since there is a lot of work with that framework. Anyway, I'll be pumping out more content later and giving you guys an update after this next week rolls around!

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!

Recap for Week One of "Discipline Month"

Sleepy Sleepy!

Interesting first week of my whole "discipline" month. I am really liking the habit structure overall. I can tell that making all of these important things habits is going to elevate the level of what I get done by a huge amount.

So far the trend for this week has been exhaustion though. I haven't been able to stay productive for really an entire section of time let alone both splits of productive working time I've scheduled. For a few days I've had to just pass out and sleep for a few more  hours.

I'm chalking that up to starting Insanity. My body is just physically tired PLUS working on mentally tiring coding problems is causing the overload. Overall I predict this to be temporary. I recall back when I did P90X years ago that the first 2-3 weeks were hell.

My roommates also are helping to confirm that I'll be tired for this first month, and then I'll have a lot of excess energy (or probably in my case, just enough to get through what I've scheduled haha)

Not as bad as I thought it would be

Interestly, I haven't had to "punish" myself at all. I've done really well with sticking to the plan and not cheating at all. I really don't want to get slapped, and I REALLY want my coffee and chocolate rewards so...hey I guess I did well on those choices hehe.

Need a better way to track time

I've been a little bit indecisive on the app I was going to build. I want to do the habits thing, but I just got the idea today to tweak it a bit and integrate some pomodoro stuff into it based on my experiences with Kanban so far. What I would like to do is make...instead of creating the tasks and tracking them, I'd like to have a timer I click and it beeps at me after the interval, and then I enter in what I got done during that time.

Overall it would be similar but it would allow me to track periods of time when I usually don't...in other words I'm getting through the day with like 3-5 hours of pomodoro but I have no idea where the rest of the time went! This is because sometimes I'll spend half an hour here or an hour there doing various things which weren't written down so I don't start the timer.

Anyway, that's the idea.

A NEW challenger approaches!

This afternoon, and through Tuesday I'll be visiting home so it will be interesting to see how that effects my habits / productivity being away. I'll have to push myself pretty hard to still do the Insanity workouts. I think I can strike a balance of keeping up the habits and enjoying my visit to family so I'll just have to work with the challenge.

I've been given the opportunity to do enough freelance to keep my bills paid, so I'll probably skip taking another random crappy $11/hr job to stay afloat and that should allow me to actually allocate more time to learning and content creation. I really want to begin putting out more videos AND blog posts, so I'll think through that later.

Ideas

One idea I had though, was to make some sort of short coding tips website similar to RailsClips, Egghead.io, or Ruby Tapas. I think a mix of those with my own style would be a lot of fun for me. Again though, it will require some thinking out before I take that leap. For now I'll keep doing my blog posts and youtube vids.

Anyway, as a TLDR...first week went well. Few stumbles and definitely need lots of improvement but I'm not unhappy with the progress. Will push on and try to ramp up!

INSANITY!

You lack discipline!

So last that I wrote, I was talking about my trouble with discipline and so as I planned out my strategy for May I've put myself in a position to try and correct that. I've scheduled at very rigorously how my day will go in terms of habits I want to integrate and things to test my discipline.

I have a chart showing punishments and rewards for not doing things. For example, if I don't get up without snooze and make my bed right away I get a big slap on the wrist (the Pavlok shock band was too expensive, so slaps will do for now).

I've added in mandatory morning writing, followed by meditation, and then an Insanity workout. Whoa, I am SO sore (day 2 completed so far). I am not even sure how I am going to handle today's exercise haha. Overall though I'm looking forward to getting into really good physical shape as I know it will help me out mentally as well.

I've also been doing the Hot/Cold shower thing and it's really cool. The cold part sucks, sure, but it makes you get this huge adrenaline rush and really fires you up to get going, and gets your breathing going for sure.

Just might have a job soon (I've said this before lol)

I feel really good about some of the upcoming job prospects. I've got several interviews lined up, and going back and forth with emails for a few others. Bumping up the number of apps I place certainly helps, but I'm sure refining my e-mail message and resume are part of it as well. Another thing, is unless the position specifically states they want a senior with 5+ years that can LEAD the team, I am applying for it.

What I've found is that in like 90% of the cases there is no "junior" position listings. There simply is either "2-3 years of experience" or "Senior with 5-10 Years" and so I've learned from speaking with others the 2-3 years is just a way of saying, "We want someone who can code." That's me!

Time chunking evolved

I have my month planned in chunks of time now, rather than by week. So I just finished up two days of content writing which gave me the posts for the month. Once I pick up a job I'll probably push that to like 4 days focused on content writing.

Upcoming is a few "hack days" where I put together a project using React / Ionic in an attempt to make a phone app. Most likely a habit tracking app. Next I'll be working to finish up the freelance project Josh Owens gave me to work on integrating a CMS backend and calendar API into a wedding planning website. Seems fun.

Alright, that's me summed up the last few days. Onward to the meditation time, and I'll talk to you in a couple of days. :)

It Has Begun!

I've done it! I quit my job as ATT customer support finally. I feel so good
about this. I had another 'temp' job lined up started a week later, but decided
to push it to 3 weeks later so that I can really focus on my personal stuff. I
have enough money saved AND I was able to land some freelance work that will
give me approx the amount of money that I would have gotten working for 2-3
weeks.

Lately I've had my discipline and efficiency levels tested. In other words, I've
been faltering a bit. This is PROBABLy expected. I have been on full high octane
mode for months now which is better than I've ever done in the past, but these
motivation things will come in waves and no human is perfect...I'm surprised
I've been able to push myself this hard for so long.

That said I really want to continue to grow and learn at a rapid pace so I have
some plans going forward for April, which I'll be able to test my theory on and
chat about as I try it out.

For now, I want to chat about this Shock Therapy idea that you can shock
yourself to eliminate habits. I don't have the money for the band itself (it's
like $190) but I decided ever time I bit my lips I'd slap the shit out of my
wrist, and after 3 days I now catch myself each time and don't do it.

I'm going to brainstorm out other habits I'd like to add or remove so that I can
apply this same technique. I may eventually get that band once I get a job
again because this is awesome. I can make so many changes by adding micro-habits
and removing bad habits.

I was chatting with my roommate about a weakness of mine for years being my lack
of discipline, and so I believe putting some hard focus on improving it will
really help me a LOT in the immediate future (and the long run obviously).

I really love overcoming challenges, but I definitely need to layer even more
difficulties into my life so that I can grow that way as well.

I've started doing the meditating which is difficult, but I am not as consistent
as I'd like. I need to begin waking up a bit earlier, I've played around with
sleep times and tried out 7 hours again but didn't change my time to bed, so I'm
getting going around 8-ish and that makes me feel WAY less productive since I'm
supercharged when I get up around 5am and nobody else is up and no sun is up
yet.

The other thing I've tried doing is taking the hot/cold showers and ending on
cold. I'm still a bit wimpy about it and only doing a small amount of cold but
if I am moving in the right direction that helps.

The next step is to get really serious about my fitness. I have been dabblign
around doing some bike riding, a bit of jogging, and some very light stuff in
between pomodoros but now I'd like to do a full on Insanity cycle (the actual
insanity workout program). If I complete that I may transition into P90X. I'd do
P90X right now but I can't realy put the money forth to go get the weights I
need...I need just around 200 bucks extra or so to do that but I'm pretty damn
broke lol.

There is a ton more I can talk about but this post is already too long winded so
I'll stop there.