Welcome to the 2nd installment in my "Weekly Summary" series where I provide quick recaps for what I worked on the previous week to help keep myself accountable. This is being posted a day later than usual as 7/4 was Independence Day for us Americans.
First, let's go over my weekly schedule:
Current Weekly Schedule
- Monday - Thursday: Study from 6:00pm - 8:00pm-ish. I'll go until 9 depending on how I'm feeling.
- Friday: Study from 1:00pm - 4:00pm I like to give myself more time to study when I can and working half-day Fridays for my current job is a great way to get in some extra time.
- Saturday: Study from 7:30am - 9:30am I give myself at least 2 hours on Saturdays even though I can often get in more time.
- Sunday: Day off This is my day to recoup, get energized, and prepare for the coming week!
This all works with my personal goal of studying/coding 2 hours per day. I would love to do more but I don't have the mental bandwidth throughout the week to do more, typically.
Now then, let's get to it!
Monday, June 28th
At the beginning of this week I committed to finishing my portfolio site so I could focus hard on learning React. I began by completing the header for my portfolio site and added the contact form which still desperately needed styling but I had to go to bed before I could get to it 😴
Tuesday, June 29th
Tuesday was a very productive night despite not originally being able to focus or necessarily feeling like working after work. This included:
- Adding polish to the header call-to-actions (CTAs)
- Added Favicons
- Checked over that all links worked as expected
- Wrote summary about Coding Catchup project
- Styled contact form and made it response
- Added a success page visitors will be greeted with after sending me an email via the contact form and styled it to include links to the home page, my Twitter, or my Blog.
How did I get all this done despite not feeling like it? The 5-minute rule.
2/3
— Ryan Furrer (@TheRyanFurrer) June 30, 2021
The 5-minute rule.
This is something I learned from @mattdavella and it has become invaluable to me.
The 5-minute rule is simply this:
If there is something you should be doing/want to do but can’t seem to focus/start, promise yourself you’ll do it for just 5 minutes.
Wednesday, June 30th
Wednesday was an ambitious day for me as I was working on adding a couple of things:
- Skip-to-content link for accessibility
- Creating a hamburger menu for the mobile navbar
Overall I still got work done despite having to crunch it in between therapy and watching Initial D with my brother. JavaScript is not a strong point for me yet so I was a little intimidated making the mobile menu work as I'd never built one before.
Nevertheless, I was determined to get it done so I could learn.
Thursday, July 1st
I completed my hamburger menu with ease! Was it the prettiest thing in the world? No. Was it the fanciest? No. Did it work? Yes.
Something I have continued to remind myself in building this portfolio is to go for progress, not perfection otherwise I'd never get it done and I'd never get back to learning React.
That said, I was planning on iterative updates to the menu to make it better as time went on and I learned more. I also started running lighthouse audits to see if I I was missing any major things like missing a meta tag in my head. I also got the navbar to be responsive and not show the hamburger menu on desktop.
Lastly I submitted my mostly "finished" project to my peers in my dip.chat group for feedback and suggestions as they are all much more seasoned devs than me which leads me to Friday...
Friday, July 2nd
The first thing I did was remove the "Skills" section from my website based on feedback from the people in my dip.chat group. I will 100% take their word for it and was not attached to it - I merely put it in there as I've seen others do the same.
In case you are interested to see what it looked like:
Again, it's nothing I'm too worried about losing. What took more effort was un-doing the work I had done the night before in adding a mobile hamburger menu as I no longer needed it due to having more space in the navbar on mobile.
After that and some other tidying up I felt it was ready for exposure to the entire world so I moved this page to be my index.html and Tweeted about it!
1/3 🧵 #100DaysOfCode #LearnInPublic
— Ryan Furrer (@TheRyanFurrer) July 3, 2021
Day 15/100
My new portfolio site is live! Please visit it at https://t.co/sRNj6LfZ5N and let me know what you think - be honest.
Built simply with #HTML and #CSS (SASS) because why not? https://t.co/DF8eJCXuAU
If you'd care to check out my site please do - The Ryan Furrer.
Saturday, July 3rd
Did a couple of light changes to the site and wrote the first draft of this blog post and began working on a second. I also added a newsletter signup to Coding Catchup so if you'd like be notified of new articles of mine via email, now you can be!
Moving Forward
I am very excited to get back to learning React so I can begin really building with it. I also want to begin working more with APIs as I've barely dipped my toes into them.
If you don't already, I'd love for you to follow my journey to becoming a web developer on Twitter where I've committed to and post updates daily! Come and say hi, I'd love to support you too.
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