Hi! I’m back after close to two months! I’ve been absent of the blog but I’ve been very active with my Java learning. I studied almost every day until two weeks ago. I made the stupid mistake of buying Civ 5 (the computer game) , which led me to buying Civ 6.
These games are fantastic. I haven’t played them in about 7 years and I missed them so much. The problem is that it’s extremely addictive and you’re always going for that “just one more turn”. If you’re not careful you can spend your entire day clicking the “Next Turn” button for one more. The first week was really bad. In the second I was aware of the problem and decreased it. Now I’m still decreasing it and picking up with the coding again.
During the time I was productive I learned a lot about multi-threading, type casting, error handling and how to write better code. I used the help of Code Ranch and had some really helpful people over there reviewing my code, which I’ve never had before. I can’t stress enough how important that was. That led me to the code review session of Stack Exchange, which is an absolute bliss of a forum. You ask them to tear your code apart and they’ll do it (get ready to realise you know nothing, it will be a reality check). Along with the theory and practice training I can safely add code reviews as an indispensable tool for learning code (and probably other subjects).
My latest decision was to take my first Java certification. It will be the easiest. At least it seems to be on the easy side considering the difficulty of CodeGym’s exercises. I’ve seen advice by good Java people on the web not to take it but it’s not that expensive and I think it will be easy enough to boost my confidence. I’ll give myself a month to prepare. And I will document the preparation in this space. I’ll try to post every day but even if I don’t I’ll post my activities on the days I didn’t post.
The test Syllabus has 13 sections. I’ll try to cover 1 per day and that will leave me a bunch of time for mock tests and complementary material. Not only this test will be important to get the certification but to put structures in place for test preparation and study flow. So let’s get it going!!!