REALITY CHECK

It is not possible for me to do 4 distinct activities for 2 hours a day. Why?

• I take a break every 30 minutes (using alarm) So that a 2-hour activity actually takes over 3 hours (includes the break time)
• I don't have the energy

I don't have the mental or physical fortitude to expend 8 hours of study or work time on four different things. This is a surprising admission. I have decided to build up to it. For now I will be okay with 2-3 areas of study in a day. I will fill the other time cleaning, organizing, reading trashy novels. For today I managed to do the reading (of a technical book) and working on Coursera course (I completed all the Postman tests for Assignment #2). It took hours to complete. There are over 30 APIs in the Confusion Server API.

Younger Self vs Me Today

Programmer: Younger Self: I can code that up fast and understand the details later.

Me Today: I need to study and understand how things work, then I will code.

Me Today: Gosh I am so slow at this.

Younger Self: It may not be the best way and I may not understand everything but it works.

Me Today: It is the best way and I can prove it. Oh, it works and can be easily changed.

Younger Self: Show off!

Me Today: Gosh I am so slow at this.

I am a bit disappointed at my progress though my Coursera course – Full Stack Web Development. I have taken 3 weeks off from starting my third assignment. Given it’s complexity I thought it best to learn how to automate testing using Postman. Somewhere along the way I managed to break my program. I also discovered that course did not address logout with JWT (Java Web Tokens)! I then found a 6-hour video course on you tube User Authentication in Web Apps. The course did a good job in certain areas, for example, explaining how Middleware works in Express and cryptography concepts used for JWT. The course I felt did not take advantage of the parts of Mongoose and Passport to create and process the things it did best. It seemed that we programmed a bit too much and did not take advantage of existing modules and/or methods. I may be mistaken on this but a review of the Coursera Week #3 will confirm my suspicions. Bottom line – no one course will perfectly teach the material but going through different presentations of the same material is worthwhile.

I am a bit disappointed that I have made little progress in my book reading schedule. When I started “Love for Lua Game Programming” the first chapter stated an expectation of knowledge with Lua – which I did not have. So I started to read a book on O’Reilly Learning Beginning Lua. It took longer than it should have to figure out how to install Lua on my Windows machine. It is a bit off putting to have to download things from github repositories! It just felt a bit informal – like the old days when I went and downloaded and installed stuff I found on the Internet. I hate doing that.

For the second week of retirement, I plan on scheduling my day a bit more (except Sunday which is catch-up day or just planning the week day). Rather than doing one thing for too long so I get slower and slower at it I plan on splitting my day into four two-hour activities.

1. Reading a technical book (8-10)
2. Coursera course (10-12)
3. Game Programming – Working on Lua and Love (12-2)
4. Electronics – Arduino (2-4)

If I feel up to work in the 6pm – 10pm range I will read fiction or write.