Back to work.
Starting slow. Still sick.

So all I’m doing is switching to Dvorak and continuing daily progress.
BEHOLD! My awesomness at Dvorak! 😂

TL;DR? It’s awesome. Buy it right now.

I was looking to dip my toes into some sort of structured help with the summer training and open source in general, because while I knew what I wanted, I just didn’t know how to go about it.

And then I realised that one of our mentors had actually gone and written a whole book on the how to. So, I bought the paperback. The binding is really good, the paper really nice (unlike other tech books I’ve read) and the words large enough to read. I expect to get a lot of use, out of the book.

And lot of use is right. While it’s a slim volume and a pretty quick read, the book is pretty dense when it comes to the wisdom it imparts.

The book has a simple (yet substantial to execute) premise. You’ve just tipped your toe into programming, or you’ve learnt a new language, or you’ve probably written a few programs or maybe you’re just brand new. You want to explore the vast thrilling world that is Open Source Software. What now?

“i want 2 do project. tell me wat 2 do.” answers the “what now” in painstaking detail.

From communication (Mailing List Guidelines) to the importance of focus (Attention to Detail) to working with mentors (the Project chapters) to the tools (Methodology & tools) to the importance of sharpening the saw (Reading …) and finally the importance of your environment (Sustenance), the book covers the entire gamut that a student or a novice programmer with open source would go through.

Shakthi writes like he speaks; pithily, concisely with the weight of his experience behind his words.

The book is chockfull of quotes (from the Lady Lovelace to Menaechmus to Taleb) that lend heft to the chapters. The references at the end of each chapter will probably keep me busy for the next few months.

The book’ll save you enormous amounts of time and heartache, in your journey, were you to heed its advice. It’s that good.

Updates:

• Much better at gtypist lesson Q1
• Also automated resizing and compressing my gtypist screenshots via an Automator folder action
• Done with Chapter 9 of the Lutz Book. I now know of tuples and strings

Nothing to do today.
Lazy weekend!

Updates:

• Daily use of Vim continues. Combining it (for the daily posts at least) with touch typing. Everything is terribly slow! It can only get better from here out :)
• Completed all of lesson Q1 in gtypist today again. Went faster this time. Confident enough to start Q2, Monday onwards.
• Learnt how to configure basic authentication on an Nginx site. Feel like I can manage my own stuff now. With this I think, I’ve done my 20 hours of Nginx too :)

Updates:

• Done with the whole first lesson in Gtypist today!
  All 8 levels! Yippee!
• Finished another baby app, that tells you how many days to your birthday.
• Finished up, chapter 8 of the Lutz book. Dictionaries make so much more sense now.

I’m a big fan of Shane Parrish’s, The Knowledge Project.
Last night, I finished Episode 35, with Robert Green.

If you have trouble figuring out how to read, or take notes, and synthesize what you learn, go listen to how a master does it. (Spoiler, it’s pretty low tech)
Take what he teaches and adapt it digitally if you want.

Robert taught it to my favorite Stoic author, Ryan Holiday who’s given a good description of it, here in his Medium post.
And if you really want to get into the weeds, Ryan breaks it all down here, in along post replete with photos

You’ll find the shownotes with links here. Give it a listen.

All of this to say, Read more! Write more!
After your first programming language, writing is the most important skill you’ll pick up as a programmer who wants to make a mark.
You have to write daily!

The way you train reflects the way you fight. People say I’m not going to train too hard, I’m going to do this in training, but when it’s time to fight I’m going to step up. There is no step up. You’re just going to do what you did every day.”

— Georges St. Pierre

Updates:

• 15 mins each, of Gtypist & Vim done

Upgraded to Nikola v8, b3 today.
And now, I realise the amount of stress, virtual environments like conda and pip, alleviate.
All I had to do was backup my blog, create a new nikola environment and run it against the blog folder.
And while everything went well, I rested easy knowing that I could get everything back to the way it was :)

Read more…

It’s taken me 50 days to somehow figure out a way to study.
I still feel like Sisyphus.
But I realise now, that I have the map. The land isn’t large and unknown as I feared earlier.
I just need to keep my head down and take it step by step.

Read more…