Week 3 — in Retrospect

The past week has been Week 3 of my learning experiment in which I attempt to teach myself web development, with the goal of being good enough to get a SWE internship next summer.

What’s gone well:

Besides stuff mentioned previously:

• Tracking: time, focus, energy. Tracking these things gives me a high-level metric that accounts for everything on the input side. It keeps me focussed on continually improving what I can improve.
• Writing (pen & paper): Before each coding task, I write down the steps on a piece of paper. When debugging, I’ll speculate as to roots of the problem with pen and paper. This is helpful because it means I have to think — I can’t just code my problems away. Subjectively, it improves my appreciation for why things work and don’t work.

What’s gone poorly:

• Older problems continue to plague me: see previous posts.
• Time: school’s begun in earnest this past week. Everything is harder now, including finding time to work on this. I know what to do — carve out a chunk of the early morning in which I work solely on this — but that’s proved difficult.

What I’ve built:

See last week’s post.

Repos with all my work for this course so far:

• https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/phonebook3
• https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/fso_test

Heroku websites (interactive):

• Phonebook: https://phonebook3-backend.herokuapp.com/
• Notes: https://safe-meadow-23610.herokuapp.com/

Going forward:

• Continuation: I’ve instituted a number of hacks, habits, etc. that have proved helpful. I’ll continue tinkering with those and observing results.
• Time: I need to get control over my schedule. I don’t know what this looks like yet, beyond the fact that I need to continue tracking things.