I’ve been unemployed for a month now. After two weeks of taking it easy (and a brief and strange foray into the mad world of contracting at a Large Financial Institution™) I have finally begun my studies in earnest. The finances are in place; I am secure for much longer than I plan to study. Current goal is to find a great employer by November or to get any programming job if I can’t find a desirable job by January.
My plans for July are the following:
- Develop a functional prototype of MemoryTyper that may be adapted to become the web component of the mobile app Remember Me
- Develop my website jonas.ninja and migrate my tech posts from here
- Read the HTTP, HTML, and CSS specifications (this is the one I’m most excited about. I’m a nerd like that)
- Become reasonably well-versed in the new ES6 features
- Read one technical book, Universal Principles of Design and Design of Everyday Things
- Review SPD1 (I took this a long time ago in Coursera, would like to refresh)
- Gain a greater awareness of the items in my master list so I can make more informed decisions about future study plans
- Improve my keyboarding speed from 60-80 to 80-100 words per minute (why is my speed so low?)
- Finally finish IIPP (just for fun. This will be my fifth or sixth attempt. I keep missing deadlines accidentally)
Future plans involve actually turning MemoryTyper into Remember Me, taking the follow-up courses to IIPP and SPD, and reading yet more books. This is the boring stuff, but I feel it needs to be done now. The exciting stuff comes in the following months: a review of Startup Engineering, a read of Interaction Design (which I’ve been wanting to read since I was forced to drop the class back in university), Soft Skills, and things like that.
I hope to put out more frequent updates to chronicle my progress. I’m considering using the Codepen blog instead for code-specific posts and leave other technical topics, but I have legal concerns about the content I put on there. Whoops, sorry, I just said something boring again. It keeps happening.