Week 8 — in Retrospect

For the past seven weeks I’ve been writing about my experience learning fullstack software development — my goal is to be good enough to land a SWE internship next summer.

This post covers the latest week (Oct. 18 ~ 24).

What went well:

• Learning in public: If you’re on Twitter, you’re probably aware of the “Learning/building in public” trend. One great example is Mckay Wrigley. I do this too: I write weekly blog posts, and tell people in my network about what I’m working on. This habit might just have led to something great. I’m on the precipice. Stay tuned.

What went poorly:

• Not fully routinized: Didn’t wrestle back my routine of working on this first thing in the morning as much as I’d like. On a good streak, though, so I’m getting there.
• No visible goal for input: I had an input goal, but no way to keep it top of mind. Would have been as simple as adding a slot in my time tracking spreadsheet, or a post-it on my desk.

What I’ve built:

• Finished Part 4 of the course
• Built a frontend for the blogs list app I’ve mentioned previously:

Homepage

Dynamic (transient) error message

Interface once logged in; list of blogs under form for new blog creation. New blogs can only be created by logged in users. Accounts are created in the backend.

Github repos for my work this past week:

• https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/part4
• https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/part5-frontend
• https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/part5-backend

Going forward:

Lots. Visible goal for hours (set @20; post-it already stuck to my desk) + more collaborative work, potentially.