This post is part of accelerated learning project, Outpacing the fast-paced world.
I extended this months challenge by one day since yesterday was weekend. It’s time to reflect back and see what went good and what didn’t.
- I learnt 4 new technologies/languages i.e. Golang, Node.js, React.js and Vue.js
- Earlier my goal was to learn R, but then switched to Vue.js in interest of usefulness.
- I made 19 contributions to the open source, as depicted by my GitHub.
- Being honest, I was able to raise only 5 merge requests to open source (Mattermost) as opposed to my goal of 20.
- Started a new open source project with a friend of mine to practice my newly-acquired vue.js skills
- Rest 14 contributions are in the form of commits or forking of repositories.
- My GitHub statistics boasts of 51 contributions in 2019, it was much less earlier.
- I’ve made my debut in open source officially, which I wanted to do long ago, when in college more than 5 years ago.
Even though I won’t boast of meeting my goal, because honestly I didn’t. For that I’d have to raise at-least 20 merge request, but I could manage to raise only 5, that’s 25% of the goal.. However I made some other contributions to open source in forms of commits and forking the repositories, but hey!! commits are not merge requests. Right?
Despite not being able to hit my goal, I feel extremely happy and accomplished, especially due to the fact that I have learnt a lot in the last month. I’ve started contributing to open source which I wanted to do long ago. Even though I’m just a dabbler in Golang, Node.js, React.js and Vue.js, but these technologies are the talks of the town and all I need is more practice to be well versed in them. One can’t be master of all trades and I don’t intend to. Especially I never wanted to learn front-end tools, in fact I don’t want to work on front-end :P, hopefully I don’t offend my readers who are front-end experts. But not knowing even a single front-end framework (besides HTML, JS,jQuery and obsolete JSPs), I felt I was missing on it. If I wanted to design my own website or someone asked me about these, all I could do or suggest was to download some good looking front-end templates from internet and somehow plug them with your backend. That’s what we did for Ethreum miner, our weekend project (Don’t search for link, it’s not open source :P).
Next, I’d like to be comfortable in some of these languages especially Golang and Node.js since both of these are backend technologies :P. Since I’ve started working on ShikshaBuddy at the same time, I expect to get a solid practice with Vue.js and Django as well. Oh well, did I mention Django? I’ve some rudimentary experience on it, but yeah, practicing more won’t hurt. Especially given the fact that Django is going to be super efficient for development if I plan to start some personal project or become CTO of a startup or start my own startup, who knows. Earlier when it came to webapp Spring was my all time favorite, not because it was the best framework but because I hadn’t worked on any other :P
This month’s challenge wasn’t really a walk in the park, especially in last one week, I used to sleep at 2 everyday to get some progress done. Contributing to open source is a time-consuming process, especially in the beginning when you are looking at the code for the first time. It ‘ll get easier, I’m certain of that. Last week, I didn’t go to gym, I didn’t have time for anything else and my brain felt overwhelmed with the knowledge and information I was trying to gulp in short bursts of time. At times, I felt like a machine, overly focused on the next task, all the time. I would walk in the night briskly just to finish 7000 steps for the day and get back to work. Yesterday while learning Vue.js I felt like sleeping because I had read a lot and needed time to digest it, you know ‘Sleep over it’ saying is there for a reason. But I couldn’t sleep because I had to finish it even though my cognitive engine of my brain was overloaded and felt like about to burnout.
This month’s challenge is memorizing a deck of cards, It’s going to be horrible for sure, given the current state of my mind, which seems utterly devoid of the capacity to memorize at times. Even Max Deutsch had problem cutting down the time to 2 minutes, given the fact that he could memorize the card even on day 1, his main challenge was to time it within 2 minutes. I, on the other hand, will be starting from the scratch and honestly I trust my brain least when it comes to memorizing stuff.
Hopefully, finishing this challenge will impart some coveted thing called memory to my brain. But before that I want a little break. I haven’t watched a single movie last month, I even stopped enjoying my evening stroll :P, moreover timing the memorizing thing to 3 minutes seems a reasonable thing to do.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
This post is part of accelerated learning project, Outpacing the fast-paced world.
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