Makers, week -4: house hunting and some good news…

Henry Cooksley
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read
Cycle routes on Google Maps. About the yellow stars… it’s possible I have a problem.

Good news. One of my best friends (my brother) is going to do the Makers fellowship at the same time as me. I’m sure it will give me even more motivation to both do well and to work well with the rest of our cohort. Exciting stuff.

A low tech diary prompt using Boomerang for Gmail.

What else have I been up to this week? Well, recently I’ve been experimenting with keeping a diary through Gmail. I wrote about it on Facebook already, so I’ll just copy-paste what I wrote there.

“I often use tech to make me do regular things that help me that I wouldn’t be able to remember otherwise. Examples: doing laundry, taking my supplements, practicing on Duolingo. I’ve never really been a diary person, but you can set up a low tech diary prompt using Boomerang for Gmail, which is a Chrome extension. Presumably there are similar tools for other platforms. Basically I get myself to summarise my day in a sentence and then once I’ve hit send I know it’s backed up somewhere. The obvious extension to this would be to summarise my weeks and my months this way, so I actually am able to recall what’s going on in my life (and what I’m grateful for) going forward. Also because this means I don’t have to necessarily burden anyone else with that information (i.e. it becomes my choice whether or not I need to unload facts about my day onto others).”

I’ve found that I do actually report what I do every day, pretty consistently, even the evening when I was slightly drunk somewhere at my friend’s wedding. I’ve done a weekly update or two already — I can see it being useful in the future, but especially over the long term when I want to look back at these days because they will have almost entirely disappeared from memory (I assume). Let me know if you decide to try something similar!

Ah, Codecademy… trust New Yorkers to make something that’s a bit slow but that looks really good.

I’ve been doing some stuff on Codewars (Ruby coding challenges) and Codecademy (HTML and CSS) to refresh my skills in preparation for the pre-course (a pre-pre-course?). I never liked CSS, but in the spirit of this blog series, and wanting to keep to a principle of ‘practice makes perfect’, I’m hoping that greater familiarity with CSS and extensions like Sass will make me learn to love it. I like design anyway, be it product design or graphic design, so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to get me to care about CSS which is pretty much the base technology of web design.

I’ve also been looking at housing in London — which isn’t really a technical thing to write about but as it’s been taking up a bit of my time, it’s probably worth mentioning! Fortunately rented accommodation seems easy to find online, at least so far, for those reading this thinking about doing a coding course similar to mine. Unless you already live in London* of course, in which case presumably you have housing sorted already... 😅(*insert your favourite coding bootcamp city here)

[EDIT 03 Sept: I think I’ve found a place to live!]

Ready for more life-not-directly-related-to-coding stuff? Throughout this learning journey (…lol) I’ve found to help me stay on track it’s important that I exercise every day. I use Strava to track my runs, and the Polar Flow app for my sports watch to track my progress. There’s something that I remember reading on 80,000 Hours once (or maybe on EA Facebook somewhere) about how rewarding jobs often have tight feedback loops. Knowing how fast you’re improving i.e. having an objective measure of your progress, whether it’s at learning to code or at running a 5k, is incredibly rewarding and motivating. As I’m definitely someone that’s struggled with motivation, not to mention anxiety/depression in the past, I’ll take anything I can get which might nudge me to do constructive things with my life.

Anyway, apologies that this has not really been much of a coding post but more of a lifestyle post. Check back next week when I’ll have sunk my teeth into the pre-course (I hope) and will officially be part of Makers (yay)!

Beginning to see progress…

Henry Cooksley

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'bug fixes and performance improvements'

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