This might turn into my ‘thinking out loud’ session where I just ramble and figure out a somewhat schedule for how I want to structure my weeks for the next 5 months.
So my contract at my current job ends at any time in June but it will be pushed for the end of June. During this time I have to go hard at preparing myself to be Job Ready. Know what I need to know and be truly confident in my fields.
So I have multiple things I want to learn and perfect but my little ‘dilemma’ is that it’s in two separate fields and within those two separate fields, it’s a lot to really learn and try and mix. But just like a full time college semester, we’ve juggled many different things with some studying, late nights and just a lot of dedication. I have some skills in programming and in animation. At my current job I can work on refining my animation portfolio and then my programming will be built on self learning.
Things I want to do in…
Video
- Work on storyboarding
- Animate more in 2d
- Learn some 3d
- Experiment more animating objects
- Work on my own designs
Programming
- Visit more meetups
- Creating faster applications
- Start committing to open source
- Work on my personal project
- Work on planning my project and committing much faster
- I want to learn node just to have an alternate to Rails
- Currently taking the Google Android Basics through a scholarship
- I want to learn algorithms
- I want to really master the React/Redux relationship, from setup to more connectivity and functionality.
I think there’s a lot to do in the next 5 months but with a bootcamp mentality I think I can make it work. With a fulltime job I just have to take every little break and make it productive. So next I’ll write how I think I can work on these specific things and then afterwards see if I can fit it into a proper schedule without going insane.
Storyboarding is pretty easy to work on. I have a couple animations already planned to do at work. So all I really need to do is just draw out what I want to do instead of winging it. Seems mega simple to think about but it’s always a step I miss. Here I’m already animating in 2d.
Learning 3d is where it’s going to be a little more complicated. I only know how to make very basic objects in 3d so animating in that world will take some time. At the end of the 5 months I don’t really want to have an animation created in 3D but I want more exposure to it, maybe be able to create some more complex objects. So that can come with some experimentation.
Working on my own designs is going to be semi difficult (weird how I find that the most difficult, I feel like these are some of the skills people are born with). I truly feel like I don’t have the design eye. But there are many resources I have at my disposal that can benefit me. I bought some books that give me ideas for design projects so I just have to commit to something and keep working from there. So first 2 things I can work on is designing my portfolio website and also my business card. I need to make them extremely basic so I can just have them ready but with all my info, not career specific, so I can easily give it to media and programming people.
Alright. Next up meetups. Already started this one and constantly looking at new ones to go to. List of meetups I’m following and trying to actively visit.
While looking for the list of the groups I follow, I found this one.
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DODGEBALL!!! Alright, back to work.
- Carbon Five
- React x Node
- React NYC
- NYC.rb
- Full Stack Web Development (Javascript, Angular, React)
- JavaScript.NYC
- Full-Stack Engineering
- React Native NYC
- CSS Layout Club NYC
Creating applications faster. Well that will just come from experience. But committing to open source. There’s one open source project that I constantly use and would like to contribute to. Reddit Enhancement Suite. It’s a javascript and css add on for the website reddit. It does some things like modify the page’s CSS with cooler designs, it enables endless scrolling, so once you reach the bottom, it keeps going. Gives you a live comment preview and some other stuff. Not sure what I would implement but since I use it almost every day, it would be cool to implement something and see it get pushed.
Commiting to my project’s is something I believe that will come from experience. For my final project, I ended up trying to plan out my project and ended up spending more time planning then actually building my project. I tend to overthink most things and I was worried that I would make my application 10x more complicated than it needed to be and I would spend weeks trying to finish the project. So proper planning and not spending too much time is something I need to do.
Node. Ahhh. Not too scared of the idea but everyone I’ve encountered outside of the school seems to be really javascript heavy people. It seems like that’s where the technology is heading toward, it’s extremely popular right now and it feels like it can be a good move. I don’t want to abandon rails and it’s definitely not my intention, but I want to make myself as job ready or qualified for a position as possible. And since I already know javascript, I’m hoping it’s not going to take me too long to learn node. React took me a while to really understand how it worked but like most things in the curriculum it all clicked AFTER the project for that chapter.
Learning Java for android development. Honestly this one is just me trying to take advantage of a free course that seems to be pretty good. It’s free. Has gotten great reviews. It accepted a lot of students so it seems like a great community of people that I can learn from, even if it just learning from scratch a whole new language.