July 19, 2019
"Week 4?" Come on, Radhika. It's been four weeks since I last wrote to this blog!
I was experiencing a lot of burnout. I talked about it more in my newsletter.
Regardless, I've been back for a week now and it's time to update on the past week only.
A lot of priorities have shifted.
After my burnout, I decided I needed a separate space for work and home. I joined a coworking space half a mile from home this week. A lot of this week has been devoting to getting used to this habit and just showing up. I also had a lot of email to catch up on, and some irrelevant job-related stuff.
After a lot of thinking, I decided to drop some things from my plate:
So, here are my main focuses now:
Some side focuses that still exist:
I think there was a lot of trauma around my work before. There were also a lot of folks who encouraged me to just be curious. I don't think it's smart to generalize while job hunting. I will generalize more after I am in my next job, and secure in my daily work.
With that, here's my schedule now that I'm used to the coworking space a bit more:
I think that's a good balance, and I think I can keep up feeling productive with the huge time block in between.
So, with that, let's move onto what I've actually worked on in those blocks this week --
This course is so good. It's hard to justify working on courses when your GitHub commits look empty, I think. It's hard to not say "I know Node. It's JavaScript, but on the back-end." It also doesn't help that I've tried faster courses and just immensely hated them.
"I'll learn Node. It'll only take 5 hours!" I fall for this trap every single time. I try and avoid the stuff for ultra-beginners because I like to think I'm past that, then I settle for some sort of halfway knowledge.
On the other hand, I learned Gatsby relatively easily (albeit slowly) using the official docs, which was still shorter than a whole video series on it. I probably still don't know a lot about Gatsby. Hmm.
It's hard to suss out the complexity of different topics. I think instead of filtering based on the topics, I should focus on the style of the tutorial -- regardless of the medium.
The marker of courses I enjoy is a sense of thoroughness & starting from principles, but ONLY when there is a project being built at the end. I like when every line of code is explained, but we only write lines of codes that serve our purpose of building this project.
Maybe the Python book was difficult because it didn't follow this pattern. It wasn't so much about the concept of it being a book, as much as it was just because the first half of the book revolves heavily around blind exposure. I find that really difficult to comprehend.
Regardless, my plan is to go through Andrew's Node course until I no longer find it useful. After that, I will go back through his React course, from the start, if only because it's been so long.
I've built a bunch of small projects over the past few weeks.
That's it.
My main focuses over the next few weeks will be --
There's a lot more I want to do, but I'm not going to go too crazy right now. I want to get some stuff done.
...
That's it for now! Hopefully next week is as good as this week. I really like how visible my progress was this week.
Join 1000+ people who are already being notified of new posts: