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.

Go Big or go Broke

Alright I suppose there is a good amount to chat about, as I have skipped a recap or two.

Focus with progress but not perfect

I'm really doing my best to work things out as to what the most important things to focus on are. I haven't been as strict on tracking ALL of the time on specific tasks on the kanban flow now that I've broken up some stuff into features. The main thing I'm working on is just focusing, and the Focus@Will app really helps with that.

I've been going much slower with the finance app and I suppose a lot of it is that I've made it more complex than necessary by adding in all of the requirements such as x-editable etc. Either way it's okay in the end, but it's causing me to have a pushed back timeline. Something to learn from for sure. At least I am learning a TON and I'm very happy that it's finally getting resolved.

More pairing!

I've done quite a bit more pairing and it has been extremely helpful and FUN. The more I do it, the more excited I get because it's very enjoyable to work out problems with other people. I've been creating Google hangouts for people to join into via Codebuddies.org, in addition to offering to pair on challenges in various Slack chats.

I have enough leeway to cover my butt for about 1-2 months, and it would be simple enough to also apply to some other 'easy to get' or part time jobs as a 'just in case' for the mean-time.

My plan going forward

I've begun to ramp up the amount of job apps I'm putting in, as I KNOW I am 100% ready for a large number of positions and so I just have to get in front of people and interview. I've gotten to the point where I want to take the risk of just leaving my current job and making a final push to getting hired in a dev role. I think I am slowly losing my sanity trying to spend 40 hours a day doing something I absolutely despise after ALSO spending another 35-40 hours beforehand working my ass off on other things.

I'm going to try and be very disciplined and stick to some hard habits and techniques to keep myself running with high energy. My day should look something like the following if I leave my day job and do this job search full time:

1. Wake up between 6-7 hours of sleep via Sleep Timer app
2. Downstairs to get pre-brewed cold coffee from frig, and heat up / eat breakfast.
3. 20 minutes of meditation
4. Some quick exercise such as squats or pushups etc to get blood pumping
5. Write out my daily standup, (what did I do, what am I doing today)
6. Hot/Cold shower
7. Start working on project (inside a hangout if it makes sense)
8. Around Noon - do a workout. I haven't planned this yet...but maybe a bike ride or otherwise a guided exercise like Insanity / P90X
1. Also I would do this first thing in the morning, but I'm too afraid of having siezures in the first couple hours of waking up...I've had too many bad experiences with working out in the morning and injuring myself.
9. Continue working on project
10. Around 3ish, start doing networking stuff and filling out job apps etc. Need to get at least 5 completed ideally.
11. I'm not too worried about what happens after that. Most likely I'll either continue working on whatever I choose, or doing a blog post, or just pairing and doing learning at night. Can't force myself to be SUPER productive for more than 6-8 hours and expect good results.

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind, Happy Life

Now that I've been meditating twice a day for 10 minutes each, I do feel a bit
more calm and less stressed out. Even though the job hasn't let up on it's
shittiness, for some reason I've just begun to be mindful about it and not get
bothered so much. It really seems to be helping!

It's funny and a bit weird too, as I've been listening to podcasts all week (as I have been for months) and like almost ALL of them are suggesting doing meditation in the morning and many talk about the Head Space app that I've been using also. Guess that's positive affirmation too :)

In addition to the meditations, I've decided to go biking/running (mostly biking b/c it's really fun) every other day. It's an easy way for me to get in the exercise I need since I enjoy it so much.

Social feedback

I'm really happy about the reception my Kanban video is getting. Apparently a lot of people have great things to say about it, and also some of my articles are getting complimented too.

After talking to Linda from Codebuddies.org last night, she suggested doing a 100daysofcode challenge, where we blog or tweet about something learned each day. Sounds fun, and I might do that.

Feature Creep

I've been continually adding tasks to my money project, so it's getting a bit of feature creep. Mostly I need to remember that to get it presentable and out I just need to focus on core functionality and not adding a ton of bells and whistles at the moment.

Other than that, I did my first pull request yesterday adding user roles and security to the Meteor Club Podcast website. I have another pairing session for that tomorrow also, so I'm glad with where that is going.

FOCUS

I just really started to use this Focus@Will app a lot more, big time yesterday and even changed the size of my pomodoro upward and I felt like I was really able to focus way more.

I wasn't really paying attention to it earlier, but I'm going to watch how much more I can focus with it as it does seem like a huge boost and I've been hearing more about it lately also.

That's all for now, peace yo!

Pairing for the win!

Alright so I did a small bit of work on my website and it's slowly getting where
I want it to be. I didn't really do any work on making it responsive as that
feels like a pretty good chunk of work and I was looking to relax on my day off
(which I really did).

Yesterday was good fun as I did some pairing on a few exercism.io projects after
completing javascript koans. Even though I felt pretty good about my javascript
knowledge, I learned a ton! Pairing is great, because you can talk out the
problems and one person can look something up while you are trying to write out
the problem.

Mindfulness

I picked up the Head Space app to help give me tips and guide me along on
meditations. I figure I'll use the app for 1-2 weeks to soak up any good ideas
and practices from it, and then move back to self directed again.

I'm pretty much thinking that I have to get back into exercising even more than
I have been. I'm doing the bike riding and really light moving around, but it
would be good to really make sure I'm doing some stuff to get my heart pumping
each day.

Overall, the more stress I release through meditation and exercise...the more
work I will get done and the more productive I can remain. That's the thing to
keep in mind.