
News Flash! I’m not perfect…
In my last post, I detailed an extensive schedule of all the stuff I wanted to do. Like a template to help guide me toward staying on track day by day toward my goals. After the first month of the year, as a surprise to no one, I didn’t exactly stick to my schedule very well. In fact, I didn’t stick to it much at all. In the mornings I’ve watched some Pluralsight videos and finished some FreeCodeCamp exercises but in the evenings after work, I spent just about half as much time as I would have liked to on projects and learning tasks. That’s ok. After all, I knew it would be impossible to do everything in that last blog post. I didn’t expect to really get into these more strict habits until closer to the end of the year. So this month I’ll do what I can to keep on improving. It’s all a process.
Excuse One: I have a new girlyfriend
If I had any excuses for deviating from the schedule, the main one would be that I’ve started dating someone who has provided a far better use of my time than sitting at my computer 90 hours per day slaving away on projects. Just sitting and talking to her is amazing, going out and doing things with her is incredibly fun, and I really think I found something worth keeping with her. Usually, after seeing someone for a month or two I’ll naturally identify a few little red flags about them I don’t like so much, but with her – I haven’t seen any of those. At all. It’s refreshing. She’s a teacher, working on two Master’s degrees, incredibly smart and fun, nice and loving, all the things. She’s definitely provided some much-needed inspiration and support with getting going on my own work. So, I want to enjoy this because I feel it is going to last. With her, I see hints of a new type of life to build toward that feels ever more fulfilling than a life spent trying to run a rat-wheel race with my own endless ambitions all the time.
Excuse Two: I have a new workyjob
Another excuse for my lack of absolute perfection in my schedule keeping could be my new job. As of January 6th, I got promoted! Yay for me. I’ve moved from a job in Configuration Management (DevOps) to one as a fully-fledged Software Developer. I’m now in charge of a full Vue.js web application for one of the squadrons at Edwards Airforce Base. I’m extremely happy about the chance to work on code all day and learn a new JavaScript framework. I haven’t worked in Vue.js before, and the backend database is something I’ve never used before either. All the people I work with directly are incredibly nice and I can tell they’re going to really help me level up my development skills. Overall, I couldn’t be more excited to see what this year brings in my professional life. Every day I’ve found myself staying late by accident just because I’m so wrapped up in work. I feel lucky about all this and I’m thanking God every day as I commute to my new office.
I still got some stuff done…
Online Learning and Audiobooks from January
With all that said, even though I wasn’t an all-out machine in January, I still did a few things. Out of the 31 days of the month I watched Pluralsight videos in 29 of them, you can see that on my profile here. There I watched videos on Vue.js and Async Javascript, both are topics I need for my day job. Less regularly, I did exercises on FreeCodeCamp on 17 of those days, getting about 60 exercises done total, mostly on CSS, Design Theory and Flexbox topics for Front-End Web Development – that profile is here. Finally, I listened to about 10 hours of Audible audiobooks while commuting. This month was finishing Jordan Peterson’s ’12 Rules for Life’ and Randal Munroe’s ‘What If?’; both of which I plan on writing a little review/report on and giving my thoughts on them in articles here on the site. I’ve started this month off with Ultralearning by Scott Young. I’m hoping it will give some insight on how I can get the best use of my time while studying and working on my projects.
A little progress on wforbes.net
For this site, this month, I’ve added a list of topics to the Software and Technology* page that I aim to fill with content. That’s 6 topics that will teach an introduction to computers and technology, 6 topics on web development that can help someone get up to speed in that career, and 7 topics in computer science that will complement the material you’d get while earning a degree. Then there are 20 ideas for articles listed. The first 10 of them take a more investigative approach that explores important aspects of technology in society and how it’s shaping our current modern world. The other 10 explore topics in software education that aren’t covered in the other pages in the three sections above which I have some ideas for.
I really hope to finish all those pages and posts by the end of the year. I’ll be mostly going in order by intended skill level… but I’ll probably be taking breaks from the beginning/basics stuff to work on things that are at my current level to keep things interesting. Some of the content I’ll be taking classes on in my current studies, so I might include some of my direct notes from my Google docs to get at least some basic info up sooner. Along with my classwork, I’ll be using tons of references from the sources online that I’ve used to learn from and adding my own personal views and experience to them to make them interesting or novel where possible.
New ideas for another website
I started working on a Vue.js app that will be put on https://wforbes87.com/. This will be the place I keep projects and code that I work on and provide a space for examples in the learning pages and articles I here on https://wforbes.net/. Since this site is built on WordPress, it doesn’t always provide me the open freely codable space that my soul truly desires. I’d really like to make a cool useful site that people can make accounts and log in to, even though its obvious only a few friends may use it rarely. I’m also using Vue extensively at work, so this will give me the opportunity to practice at home on something I actually have up for the public.
Stay tuned and God bless! Thanks for reading.
* = the Software and Technology page was on an old version of this site. This will be revised in 2024, stay tuned.
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