Between a full-time job, a family, home maintenance, and some backyard chickens, I manage to drum up about 23 minutes a week for hobby-time. I have two areas of interest I continue to explore, and curious to get some feedback “from the cloud”. Would love any opinions on…
1) Blogging
So I’ve been blogging for a decade. I enjoy the process of picking a topic, thinking on it, and writing something up. But I often find it frustrating and unrewarding. It’s frustrating because there’s a feeling of pressure to keep up a certain pace/continuity in writing. It’s also tricky as I always want this to be my personal voice, and be free to write things without tying in my employer in any way.
2) Coding
I started programming as a teenager in the Turbo Pascal era, and stopped advancing in the early days of C++ and object oriented programming. I picked up PHP and JavaScript (and Visual Basic!) over the past decade, and while I’m nowhere near the calibre of a professional developer, can certainly build a thing or two of use. I’m now following the awesome Ray Wenderlich tutorials to learn Swift, which I’m mostly enjoying. But again, lots of frustrations as I get set back by not understanding some basic/fundamentals of either XCode, Objects, or some other “simple” knowledge base that I had never picked up.
In either/both case, I also have a personal bad habit in that when I get too frustrated or hit a roadblock, it’ll tend to set me pretty far back. Something I need to work on, of course.
Reason to code more: have fun building things. Best-case scenario is make working prototypes of ideas I have.
Reason to blog more: have fun writing about things. Best-case scenario is increase visibility as an industry thought leader.
Would love to hear any feedback (if anyone’s still reading?)!
Turbo Pascal: I used to use the Borland compiler. Then I realized they were embedding their name in my compiled code, so I re-engineered the code and put in “f*ck you Borland” in it’s place. Hollaback!