FED Journal 7

This post was first published on my personal WordPress.com blog. It was migrated here for historical reasons (and because I am a compulsive completionist) and may have been edited from its original form and content.

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.

Becoming a Front End Developer - Diary 4

This post was first published on my personal WordPress.com blog. It was migrated here for historical reasons (and because I am a compulsive completionist) and may have been edited from its original form and content.

This is a post I’ve been excited to write for a while. I’ve been researching the things I want to accomplish during my transition to becoming a front-end developer. This is only my initial set of goals; I will make adjustments as I progress. I also cannot make any comment on pace; I can’t make meaningful estimates about things I don’t know. It’s a long list of goals, and I probably won’t get to all of them very soon, but it’s important to write down all ideas so they can be organized together.

Meanwhile, right outside my apartment, this is happening: a parade, and, later, about 20,000 bar crawlers. I think I will stay inside… I’m such an exciting person, right?

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Becoming a Front End Developer - Diary 3

This post was first published on my personal WordPress.com blog. It was migrated here for historical reasons (and because I am a compulsive completionist) and may have been edited from its original form and content.

It’s not quite a diary any more, is it? Having a full-time job sure does put a damper on things. Deliberating over whether to abandon my current job it is even more of a drag. In this diary entry, I discuss the very non-technical aspects of leaving your current job to become a Front End Developer.

I did not expect that deciding to leave my employer would be so draining. Friends and family tell me that leaving a job without another lined up is a terrible idea, and I understand all too well. The safest route would be to keep working, no matter what. I understand their fears, truly–but I also see the potential prize if I take the risk, and they do not. I know there are lucrative positions out there for those who have the skills necessary to perform well. This knowledge does not dispel my fears. And so I am in the proverbial frying pan, afraid to stay in my position (because my career won’t advance), and afraid to leave (because money has a bad habit of disappearing faster than you expect).

This diary series is not nearly as glamorous as I thought it would be. Hopefully soon I can get to the glam biz of learning technologies, frameworks, libraries, tools, methodologies, and soft skills related to being a successful frond end web developer. Instead, I find myself dealing with the difficult, dirty, serious and necessary business of making potentially life-altering decisions.

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