Weekly Summary: 7/11 - 7/17
Sunday, July 18, 2021
Weekly goals review and setting
Welcome to the fourth installment in my weekly summary series, where I give quick recaps of what I worked on the previous week to keep myself accountable.
First, let's go over my weekly schedule:
Current Weekly Schedule
Monday - Thursday: Study from 6:00pm - 8:00pm-ish. Sometimes I go until 9pm depending on how I feel.
Friday: Study from 1:00pm - 4:00pm I like to give myself more time to study when I can, and working half-days on Fridays for my current job leaves a significant time for extra coding.
Saturday: Study from 7:30am - 9:30am I give myself at least 2 hours on Saturdays, even though I often get more time in.
Sunday: Day off This is my day to recover, get energized and prepare for the coming week!
All this works with my personal goal of studying / coding 2 hours a day. I would like to do more, but I don't have the mental bandwidth to do more, usually, throughout the week.
I don't always stick to this schedule, but I try my best to do so. Now then, let's get to it!
Sunday, July 11th
Completed the code re-factoring of my wedding website. I normally don't like to do work on Sundays, but with last week being a light week of coding, I believed it was wise to add the extra day.
Monday, July 12th
Putzed around with Gatsby plugins and failed to get one working that would allow me to embed tweets on Coding Catchup - I will try this again in the near future!
Published last week's Weekly Summary on Coding Catchup and Dev.to
Worked on a new blog post about building my portfolio - coming soon!
Tuesday, July 13th
Studied React
Added more content to my wedding website - a honeymoon fund!
Wednesday, July 14th
Studied React
Thursday, July 15th
Brainstormed ideas for React projects. While this could be an easy thing to do and simply commit to building the "go-to" projects like to-do lists, calculators, etc., I want to do more than that...
That being said, I also need to start building and cannot get caught in "tutorial or course hell." That is, merely consuming content on how to build things, but never actually doing it.
I also squeezed in some studying of React - I found a free resource by Kent C. Doddswho created the acclaimed Epic React so I thought I'd give it a shot. This is hosted on egghead.io - "The Beginner's Guide to React" - I only just started, but am expecting to get through it all early next week!
Friday, July 16th
Friday was a light night - I had a hectic week and needed some downtime with my fiancée. Regardless, I still added some more content to my wedding website - this time it was the hotel information for our guests! I think the site is 99.9% complete and can't see myself making radical changes or adding a ton more to it. I had other wedding stuff to take care of this night, which added to the light night of coding.
Today also concluded my 2nd stint of working in dip.chat - an accountability group for web developers built by Joe Previte. I cannot recommend dip.chat enough - or even just having an accountability-buddy - some way to keep yourself accountable has been huge for me these last 2 months.
Saturday, July 17th
Finished writing up this blog post and scheduled it for publishing. Wrote out my weekly newsletter, which I am still experimenting with. I am trying out a different format this week, rather than simply making the body of email contain this same blog post.
I also continued to work on my blog post about building my new portfolio. I ran out of time to study React, but there is always next week!
Moving Forward
This week I am trying to dive deeper into React. I'm almost done reviewing what I had learned previously in my Udemy course so that I feel more confident moving forward in it. I am also racking my brain for websites/apps that I could begin building to create not only portfolio projects, but eventually turn them into real products.
As my former passion in my life, I want to build something for musicians. It would be so fulfilling for me to provide value for the friends and colleagues who have helped me along the way by eliminating a pain-point for them. We'll see what happens in the coming months!
If you don’t already, I’d love you to follow my journey to becoming a web developer on Twitter where I’ve committed to and post updates daily! Come and say hi, I’d love to support you.