The problem
I’m pretty sure everyone teaching themselves anything, and especially coding, had days where they felt overwhelmed or lost. I don’t feel like that all the time but it’s definitely not a rare feeling.
In the past year I’ve been exposed to so many new technologies that I’m still finding it hard to understand what to pick in lots of circumstances. When I finish a tutorial or a small project I often get lost in deciding what will be next and what’s the best way to go about it. Often I start tutorials and abandon straight away if I understand the technology is outdated or the tutorial is irrelevant.
Solutions
I’ve come up with two ideas to mitigate these issues. One of them is to spend more time in forums like reddit and quora. There’s so much going on in these spaces at any given time. Just reading other people’s questions makes me thing of many things I wasn’t aware of. And often times the questions are similar to mine or in an adjacent sphere of interest or difficulty.
The second is too seek the structure of an online learning platform. Although I love Udemy courses, they can also take you in a million directions with all different and disconnected approaches. So I’ve decided to jump into Windows Learn, which is free and has a bunch of learning resources. That will be a preparation for joining Pluralsight, the most recommended platform in my research.
All of that will be done while I’m working on a project. If there’s something I learned in this journey so far is that I need to be building something. I have motivation to learn at any time but If I’m building, that motivation is increased significantly.
Life is Good
Life is good at the moment. I’ve been very social lately, catching up with a lot of friends for coffee. Also haven’t skipped gym for five days since last weekends mini-crisis and sleep/nutrition are back on track. I’ve also got a heater so now I can avoid the coldest times of the day.
I still find managing my days pretty hard. I end up not doing things I want or should do for pure lack of planning or distractions that are time-costly. But at least I learned to let go. I don’t get depressed if I don’t update the blog every day but I’m able to do everything frequently enough without having to cram everything into 24hs.
But If I ever fall into any mental rabbit hole, all I have to do is remind myself of 11th of June of 2020, the day when I got my PR and what that represents. Everything will turn out alright, even if I have some less than great days.
Input
In the past month I’ve been jumping around a bit with Podcasts: Tim Ferriss, Jocko, Dan Carlin and more recently, Jordan Peterson. I’ve also engaged in a Computer Science series on Youtube and my new favourite is School of Life, specifically the Relationships channel. So many good insights. Practical, simple, down-to-earth applied philosophy. I’ll be posting some of them here. I highly highly (yeah, two highlies) recommend.
Mini-challenge
I have two mini-challenges for tomorrow
The first is not to text anyone or read any news before 12pm. The second is to register track my activities a few times a day instead of just one for accuracy purposes.