Since I last wrote my goals on this blog, a lot has changed with my life. In February, I was still finishing up my semester. Since then, I’ve started my co-op position in May and I’ve learned quite a bit in the four months since last writing.
Reflecting on my February goals
- My first goal was to finish the semester. I ended up dropping my elective and transferring a credit for it instead; however, I wrote The Chrono-Investigator for the class, exploring a time travel/forensic investigation concept I’ve been developing in my head for a while. As tough as the semester was, both in terms of content and the hiccups at my college, I pulled through/ Miraculously, I improved my GPA - if only by the slightest amount.
- I added one new piece to my portfolio - N-Crypt Social, a recreation of old Twitter for my application security class. This really challenged my knowledge of React, and I learned a lot about how web frameworks work in general.
- I did not make a dent in my reading backlog, unfortunately - if anything, I added to the list!
- As I suspected, I am still working on my health. The standing desk idea is still ongoing, and I’ve even heard of desk treadmills from my coworkers, which is definitely something to look into.
Goals for June
- Finish a side project.
- A (seemingly) easy one would be to revamp my RNG TTS app. This was made with vanilla JavaScript and was my first exposure to JavaScript Promises and using a CSS framework (Bootstrap). It’s not perfect - I have disabled the voice speed input and the text-to-speech aspect is not in sync with the number display aspect. I’m currently working on rebuilding it in React TypeScript both to learn React and Typescript and to tighten my understanding of Promises, which are very important to know in JavaScript.
- Aside from that, I have existing projects I want to improve (N-Crypt Social comes to mind) and new ideas that only live on a neglected Notion page. Finding the motivation for side projects is personally difficult for me, but the company I work for is very amenable to working on side projects.
- Update my portfolio more. I want to add animations of my projects and show more aspects of it. I also like having static versions of the web application to demonstrate functionality. I also want to keep the Bioinformatics section, but I may keep it to a separate page entirely.
- Continue reading my reading list. I am reading Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye and Head First Design Patterns for book clubs, and I am also reading Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin on my own time. The book clubs help keep me accountable, and I’ve been slowly working my way through Clean Architecture.
- Finish an art project. There has been a long-outstanding art project I have yet to start, and I’m hoping the looming deadline I gave myself at the end of the month is enough motivation to get it started.
One common theme throughout my life is overcoming perfectionism. I have a lot of project ideas and half-finished thoughts and sketches, but only a fraction of it is ever published. If perfection is my goal, nothing will ever get finished. At this stage in my career, I want to focus on finishing projects, whether or not I’m fully satisfied with them. (And I suspect I never will be.)
During the first few weeks of my co-op, I practiced code katas with my fellow co-ops. For those who don’t know, code kata is a short coding exercise to refactor messy code, or otherwise rewrite code without interfering with the logic. The intent is to practice refactoring code, making mistakes when it doesn’t matter, so that we can perform on the job.
The thing about code katas that we found is that there were many ways to do them, and there was no true finish line. The more we refactored, the more we found we could improve and refactor. The goal of refactoring isn’t to reach the best state. That doesn’t exist. The goal is incremental improvement over time. Value will come from actually doing things, and that includes making flawed projects.
The theme of my goals isn’t to reach a threshold of quality; it’s simply to get something finished. Everything from my art, to these blog posts, and my side projects – all of it is imperfect, but all are helping me toward incremental improvement.