Dgplug

Here’s putting in some thought into what I’ll do this #CNC2021. Their first mail asked me to reflect on … Determine what has worked. Figured out the basics of data structures and algorithms Figured out how to write in Python Figured out how write my own code. Took a lot of work and persistence. Took a lot of grit. Realised that I’m not “slow.” I just have a hard life and could only put in fewer hours compared to the folks who zoomed past me. Determine what has NOT worked. Just what I said above but in a slightly negative manner. This takes a lot of grit. I need to figure out how to stop bare knuckling it and do it sustainably. I’m dog slow currently. I need to look up everything and I get distracted when I do that. I keep comparing myself to others and get overwhelmed What are your long-term goals? Get a job by accomplishing, in the next 6-12 months, what I listed in my introductory post. I need to do all sorts of basic exercises in the languages I am learning (Python/HTML/CSS/JavaScript) I need to find and contribute to open source projects, to get a feel of how it is to work with folks and to understand how this whole world functions I need to write toy projects for myself. What are your short-term goals? By the end of this challenge, I want to get into the rhythm of writing code across all the three goals I listed up above I just need to see steady forward progress

Enough learning. I now have to drill what I’ve learnt over the past few weeks and months by writing lots of code. Been noodling around with what that might look like in my head. Here’s what I got. After tentatively coding up stuff in a couple of domains and after a short chat with a friend, I realise I love writing code for the web. I love reading. I love to write on my blog. I love that with just a few keypresses, my words can be read by anyone on the web, no gatekeeper required. I would love to write code to enable this for more people. I would love to play and tinker and push at the boundaries of this domain. This intersection of all this is web development. Ergo, I want to become a web developer. ...

Updated version of the post. I seem to have somehow, mangled the old one. I’ll just blame it on the gremlins in the cloud. I’ve been “soft” looking for a job, since the end of last year when I learnt the basics of Python. (Want me to come work with you as a junior developer? Here’s my resume!) And I’ve had rejection after rejection after rejection. I apparently am good. I have skills. I could be an asset for companies. But I am not “quite” what folks are looking for, not quite right for them. I am not quite what it is, folks are looking for, to take chance on. I am a square peg … ...

If you want to someday make money from your skills and your craft, you owe it to yourself to read this. If you have never read Lucas, you owe it to yourself to read him. Buy Cashflow for Creators! My highlighted notes from the book follow … Craft is the nuts and bolts of how you do The Thing. For a writer, it’s stuff like grammar and spelling and reading. For a glass artist, it’s not mixing different COEs or—at the highest levels—how to mix different COEs. Painters need to understand that light and pigments blend colors very differently, how to prep and clean a canvas, and so on. ...

This post was first sent to my newsletter on April 4th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) A tiny bit of houskeeping before we begin. I used to track how many people read the newsletter, partly out of morbit curiosity and partly because Sendy, the software I use to write and schedule these letters, did not have an option to turn it off globally. I would have to turn it it off every single time, I wrote a letter and well, my life is too short to be doing all that. However with the latest version of Sendy all that has changed. And I have turned off all tracking! Yippee! Talk about the importance of sane defaults!) And now, on to the letter … ...

Despite financial troubles there’s a sense in which my childhood was immensely privileged — a pauper in the material world, I was a sultan in the world of ideas. — Erik Hoel I started by wanting to share that quote and link on my microblog and then my thoughts turned into a blog post sized comment. I decided to post it here too, then. ...