My plans for the next 3 months!

I have at least 3 months off from work. That is the amount of time I have to wait before returning back to my company (after retirement) as a contractor. I am not 100% sure that I will return back to the same job. I have decided that I will select 13 technical books to read during that time. I figure I will take 1 week per book since I do not have a full-time job. The books shall cover the following categories: Android Development, Java Enterprise Development, DevOps, Web, Game Programming and Electronics and Hardware.

The books I have selected (and will review here are):

1. Löve for Lua Game Programming, Darmie Akinlaja
2. API Testing and Development with Postman, Dave Westerveld
3. Beginning Node.js, Basarat Ali Syed
4. Node Web Development, 5th Edition, David Herron
5. Android Programming for Beginners, 3rd Edition by John Horton
6. Hands-on Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud, by Magnus Larsson
7. Mastering Microservice with Java, 3rd Edition, by Sourabh Sharma
8. Learn Kotlin for Android Development, Peter Späth
9. Beginning Jenkins Blue Ocean, Nikhil Pathania
10. Beginning Arduino Programming, Brian Evans
11. Beginning Blockchain, Singhal, Dhameja and Panda
12. Beginning Unreal Game Development, David Nixon
13. Learn RPG in Gamemaker: Studio, Ben Tyers

I selected the first three since I am working on a Coursera course. I want to re-visit my attempts to learn Android programming. I started a Udacity Nanodegree in late 2019 but the course was rather dated. My work colleagues and I complained - a lot! I dropped the course. I see that they have changed the course considerably since we dropped it – using Kotlin and more up-to-date libraries. The next set of books pertain to the area I will probably pursue if I return to the job market – Java enterprise development. The rest of the books represent new topic areas in the field of DevOps, Microcontrollers, Blockchain and game development tools.

At the same time that I will be attempting to read a book a week I plan on completing several courses I started:

1. Coursera – Front-end Web Specialization
2. User Authentication in Web Apps()
3. Introduction to Game Development with Lua
4. NodeJS and ExpressJS

The plan for today is to continue on (2) User Authentication in Web Apps and the Postman book.
Note: I had a collapse of sorts in my Coursera course. I tried to start Assignment #3 but it failed to work. I did start creating Postman scripts to automate the testing process and I am not sure of what change or modification I made that corrupted my project. I did discover the change to JSONTokens broke the logout.
So I decided to take a step back and re-learn some things – hence the youtube videos and books on NodeJS and Expree. I plan on resuming the course next week.
Let the games begin.

What does a software person do in retirement?

Today is my first day of retirement. It was supposed to be my last day working but the company took away my access this morning. I feel so sad starting the day like this. I have decided to get my personal website brainycode in order. I need to figure out how to fix some issues in the new website. I would like to create a new logo for the site or at least clean it up. It looks a bit raw. I am working on my final course in a Front-end specialization course on coursera - the MEAN Stack. Unfortunately, I find I need to supplement the course with youtube videos that go more in depth into Node.js and Express. I also need to brush up on some advanced JavaScript concepts - callbacks, promises, and async. I plan on blogging more about my adventures in trying to create content for brainycode and the various projects I pursue. Why not just post on my personal site? This site makes it easier to create a page and add it to the web so I can share with the world.