December 05 Newsletter
Hey friend, here's what's been on my mind
Not even a tumbleweed rolled through my blog in the last two months.
I kept my writing on the back burner while I sold my house and moved. The big transition is mostly over, and I have a new spot set up for writing. I'm excited to get this ball rolling again.
Up next are a few ideas I want to reflect on.
How I want to handle challenging goals
In the past, I was all too willing to juggle several tough challenges.
I knew that selling my home would be an immense emotional labour. With that in mind, I convinced myself to lower my expectations of what I could handle while navigating this change. The things that took a lot of my energy were:
- Parting with belongings that would not make the move
- Lowering the stress for the whole family
- Keeping the home ready for viewing
I told myself it's okay not to carve out time for daily writing and learning.
Other significant areas of my life can stay in maintenance mode while I sort out urgent goals.
Goals in maintenance mode
Some goals don't have a finish line and require a consistent effort over a long period.
Regarding career development, I kept up my learning by forcing myself to study while waiting for my kid at his extracurricular activities—thirty minutes of reading an O'Reilly tech book, an hour and a half of videos on YouTube or KodeKloud, and so on. My kid gets his swimming lessons and community centre time while I get to scratch the itch to keep learning.
This level of effort is enough to keep up with my goals in this season of my life.
Keeping a dev log
I started a dev log and diligently tracked my learning, the obstacles, and their solutions.
Tracking has been pivotal to my financial success and fitness journey. Keeping a dev log allows me to mine my own experiences for insights, trace my progress through learning topics, and combat imposter syndrome by having a history of accomplishments to reflect on.
Now that I have a dev log to review, I can kickstart my writing habit and have an up-to-date picture of where I am.
Seeking out mentors
After completing a coding bootcamp, I had an opportunity to connect with mentors through the Microsoft Reach mentor network.
I like to think that my self-directed learning plan is well-researched. Still, I want to bounce off my ideas with people further ahead in the industry. I'm glad there are opportunities to have my ideas validated so I can make minor course corrections.
Writing about it makes me wonder when I could be a mentor myself.
There we go. It's a brain dump to regain my writing habit.
Check this out
Advent of Code
I heard of this annual event a while back.
According to its about page, Advent of Code "is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other." Tackling Christmas-themed coding puzzles sounds interesting.
I will use this year's challenges to try solving coding puzzles in Golang.
Check out Advent of Code here:
Google Summer of Code 2024
This event just wrapped up, and it's a good time to see what type of contributions the program accepted.
From this post, "The program's core principle revolves around mentorship; pairing participants with experienced developers from open source organizations of all shapes and sizes." It seems like a terrific way to start engaging with the open-source community and contribute to the tech we all use.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation seems to participate every year, and it would be cool if I could find a way to contribute to their organization.
Check out Google Summer of Code here:
In case you missed it
Nothing here since I have yet to write!
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