Hey all, I’m back! So it turns out the Mega Cold I had was actually pneumonia. Yeah. I was diagnosed and promptly put on a full course of antibiotics, plus some additional palliative pills for the general misery. I’m feeling a lot better now! And as such, I got a lot more done this week.
- Worked on adding my project to my JavaScript page
- Dramatically improved the readability and usability of my mobile site (enlarged buttons and lists, changed font sizes, etc.)
- Worked on creating drop-down menus
- Also generally got my life together overall: got back to working out, job hunting, working, learning more coding skills, etc.
Here’s a breakdown of what I did and when:
- At the beginning of this week, I went to the doctor’s and got prescribed antibiotics. For the first few days my main goals were things like “walk around” and “take a shower”. Super simple being-a-human stuff.
- As I got better, I could work on coding in bits and pieces. I did research for my dropdown menus and looked at how other people had done it. As soon as I was well enough to code, I worked on improving the usability of my mobile site, since it was really just a bunch of fiddling with CSS.
- Through yesterday, I did a lot more: I worked extensively on adding my project to my JavaScript page and I wrote a ton of code for my dropdown menus. However, I felt a bit overwhelmed, and I definitely felt like I was fighting an uphill battle. That was around the time I realized something, which brings me to my next point.
Here’s what I learned this week.
When I started this project, my stated goal was to create four pages to showcase my skills. Somewhere in the process, I realized that I had gotten sidetracked into trying to improve my skills, so I could showcase what I wish my skills were, not what they actually are. The problem was, I thought I was showcasing my skills, but I just kept thinking “oh, I could make this little thing better, it won’t take long”. I started working on the thing, and a few hours passed. I had part of the thing, but not this other part. I figured out how to make that other part, but then it wouldn’t work the way I wanted and I had to debug it. Before I knew it, a week had passed.
It was like I had started walking toward a huge mountain early in the day. Because it was so big I figured it was pretty close, and I could get there by that evening, no biggie. But by that evening, the mountain was still huge, and still very far away, and I began to realize that what I had thought would take a day could take a month.
So the biggest thing that I’ve learned this week is that I’ve gotten off track with my goals for this project.
Here’s how I’m going to fix that next week.
- Rather than trying to learn more in order to make my projects better, I’ll focus on trying to showcase what I do know. I can always work on making my projects better in the future, but that wasn’t the goal for this month.
- I’ll collate information and create my last three pages. If I can’t embed the actual code for a project (which I frequently can’t, because it frequently involves learning an entirely separate programming language/concept; looking at you AJAX), I’ll just create a video of it running and embed that, or I’ll take screenshots and embed those.
I’m very determined to finish this project and to achieve the goals I set out at the beginning, so I’ll do whatever it takes next week to make that happen.