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It has been a while I have not blogged about my plans or progress.
I have been making much slower progress than I first thought.
Since it is now the end of the year, and we are getting close to 2022, it is time to look back at the last year, learn the lessons, move on to the next year even better.
There were mainly 2 reasons I didn't make the fast progress I first imagined.
One is, personal stuff I'm going through. I won't describe it in much detail here, but I've been struggling with migraine, depression, c-ptsd from narcissistic emotional abuse.
The thing is, learning to code requires mental clarity and focus, as well as certain level of physical health and energy.
I will only briefly share what has helped so far:
Have a good self-care and daily routine. Go to bed early to get enough sleep. Shower, exercise, eat well etc.
Make feeling good a priority. This is one thing I learned from Abraham-Hicks LoA stuff. And this is new for mr. All my life I've been told my emotions don't matter, and I cannot trust them. But it is also very relieving and empowering to know that I have an inner GPS system of emotions.
Meditate and journal. Meditate to calm the mind. Journal to dump what's in your head to paper (or hard drive) so you now have records you can work on.
Slow steady progress is better than cramming then burnout. Better to learn 2 hours every day for 10 days, than 10 hours a day for two days, and then burn out.
Second part is, it can be quite complicated and overwhelming to get into a new area like blockchain development. There are soo many things to learn.
Have you seen any of the roadmaps like this?
I already have a tendency to overthink, and get paralysis by analysis.
So I needed a simplified plan. I cannot learn 100+ things all at once.
And since my initial goal is to get a developer job asap, I searched for minimal stack to get hired.
I have found that people can be hired as front end web3 developers with a much smaller stack.
HTML-CSS, Javascript-React, and then how to connect to web3.js or ethers.js and probably some TheGraphProtocol.
I have found out about this from a twitter thread here:
How to get hired in crypto: Frontend Edition
Apparently that's the minimal developer skill stack to get a decent web3 developer job.
Not that I don't want to learn full stack web3 development eventually. But I do think, if I get a front-end job first, I can learn the rest while I'm earning money on the job.
Now, there is no course or tutorial that teaches all of this in a single place. But there are pretty good resources that teach all of them one by one.
The first course that caught my eye is front-end web development from simplilearn.
I like that it covers the basics of everything. Git-Github, HTML-CSS, Javascript-react.
Maybe I can skip angular and instead learn about bootstrap or tailwind. I see them more often in Web3 job descriptions, compared to angular.
My current goal is to complete this course as the first course till the end of the year. Then every week study more, add to my portfolio a little bit, apply some jobs, maybe contribute to some open source projects or DAO's I like. And see what happens.
I'm hoping I'll be job-ready by the end of January 2022. But of course, what I believe is job-ready and what employers think is enough, may be quite different.
Only one way to find out. At least, I may get a few interviews and some feedback.
At this point, I'm more focused on setting up systems and habits rather than end-goals and deadlines. Because I cannot control the outcome. But I can control my habits and work.
Here is a video that inspired me to focus more on habits and systems:
So, if I summarize my current plan for the next week, month and beyond:
- Study one course for Front End Web Development this week.
- Add one course and one deliverable (something I can add to my portfolio) every week
- Blog about what I have learned and have done daily Mon-Fri
- As I see jobs I'm interested in, apply them.
- As I see open source projects, DAO's etc that I like, contribute them if I can.
- As I see freelance gigs that I can do, apply them.
- Do my best, hope for the best.
I hope this post helps someone with similar goals/plans. Let me know what you think.