Since starting Cappuccino Codes my coding journey improved ten-fold. I wish I had this clarity from the beginning and I’ll make sure to use what I learned from my mistakes and to point others in the same direction. Obviously I’m far from successful as I still didn’t land a developer job, but I’ve never been so productive and I can attribute that to a shift in my mindset.
The main idea with Cappuccino Codes is to create an one-stop-shop where I’ll have the blog, educational resources, my portfolio, my CV and my projects. Having a brand with a vision and a mission statement provides a clear and narrow locus in my mind, where everything related to my coding activities go to. It doesn’t stop me from having broad interests and cultivate new thoughts and processes, but it gives me a mental safe harbour, a compass. And, most importantly, it makes decisions about time allocation easier. When I sit down in my allocated time for coding I know exactly what to do and how long to do it for.
Without much more beating around the bushes, the main thing right now is to have a portfolio with 12 items in the end of 2021. I’ve been listing the stuff I’ve already built and I realised I already 5 items. Three of them are real websites with real purposes and two of them are apps I created for training. I’m currently working on my sixth and it will definitely be ready by the end of the month. If I reach the 12 apps goal early, I’ll just work on improving their looks and functionality. I think depth is as important as width when building an entry-level portfolio and attention to detail will impress recruiters.
Some Ideas
Some of the things that I’ve been researching and considering:
- Getting an Azure Certification: Apparently Microsoft retired the ASP.NET certification to push people onto the cloud. It seems like this is where things are heading and I want to be part of it. So I’ll definitely look into getting the AZ-900: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-fundamentals
- Internet of Things: I’ve already started looking into projects that involve IoT (Internet of Things), which is the ability to connect the physical world with the internet. A theoretical example would be having a water bottle with a sensor that sends a tick to a database every time you finish drinking so you can automatically measure your water drinking habits. Telemetry has always fascinated me and I want to dive into it.
- 120 hours in December: In the past week I stopped tracking every minute of my life and ended up coding way less than necessary. Also having to allocate time to deal with getting a car and a license contributed to that. So now I’ve decided I need to get back on track and code for 120hs in December. It’s not that hard considering the life I’ve crafted for myself but it does require some discipline.
- Personal Life Management App: One of my portfolio ideas is obviously a mobile app. As far as I know I’ll have to use a technology called Xamarin Forms to create it. And I want to have an app that serves as headquarters for the stuff I want to track in my life. I’ll start with simple things like sleep and a budget, with unified database, but eventually I want it to have the ability to track other aspects of my existence.
- Using Reddit: Using reddit in my coding journey will serve many purposes. First to just get help with general questions I might have. They will be questions about the big picture, architecture and paths to follow and not specific coding-related. Those will always go to stack overflow. They do a good job at keeping opinion-based discussions out of there so it’s predominantly technical. Not a lot of “why”, but a lot of “how to”. Second, it will fulfil my need to help others. There are many beginners in those forums with the same questions I had when I started and often times their questions are left unanswered or answered poorly. Third, it will help me to see what’s going on, what are the trends and what other more qualified and advanced professionals are doing.
So that’s it for now, there’s much more in my mind but I’ll try to keep these posts somewhat short. Right now I want to prioritise consistency over depth.