Reflecting on week one
I still have some time left today, but I'm starting the next week on Sunday.
So let's review. What were my goals for this week?
- Blog about useful tips I know already to increase my productivity.
I worked on my front end testing guide and got it ready enough to show the rest of my team at work and ask for any input. I'll post that as the first post on our 'company techinical blog' which will be exciting.
I made a tiny blog post of topic ideas.
For posts other blog posts, I decided I wanted to set up a proper blog for them first, so I started learning how to set up digitial ocean with Ghost, and also made some progress transferring an old personal blog and my art blog accross.
- Share and read blogs that contain useful advice.
Didn't do this, unless reading twiter counts.
- Find a way to document my day over the week and work out what I'm spending a lot of grunt time on that I shouldn't need to be spending.
I tried recording some of my time in Slack a little bit, but didn't manage to record that much.
- Analyse my bash history and try to add useful aliases and command line tools.
I looked at it, but didn't get around to adding any extra aliases. I didn't see much there that seemed like it could give me much of a win, apart from setting up a few more git aliases, and getting more comfortable with docker-compose.
- Try out some productivity tools I think might be helpful.
Didn't try this. I did manage pick the brain of someone at work for some productivity strategies I can try next week however.
- Try some tools to help collect information about what I'm spending time on too.
Didn't try anything other than a few notes in Slack some days.
- Do research on the internet looking for things that take up programmer's time and frustrate them that don't have good solutions yet.
Didn't do this.
I had far too many goals it seems.
The biggest issue was that I decided I wanted to set up a proper platform to put things on for people to read, and the way I chose involves a lot of setup and learning.
On the flip side I can blog about what I learned once I'm done so hopefully other people can have an easier time setting it up, but I didn't take into account how to plan it all and didn't try to do anything in the meantime to share what I was doing. Doing that hijacked a lot of my plan for this week.
I also got the opportunity to learn a bit about how we've set up our JavaScript build ecosystem at work this week. This is a space that's getting pretty complicated, and I think it will start to become commonplace for everybody to start hiring 'JavaScript Platform Engineers' soon.
I can hopefully write some posts about that stuff soon too while I'm learning all about it.
2020-02-29 3:30 pm