Yeah I know, it’s the 9th January already. I’ve been busy. First there was New Year’s Eve, then there was a hangover, it was a bad hangover, a long hangover, followed by a cold. Excuses, excuses.
Actually I have been busy. Most of last week was spent on telephone interviews, actual interviews, travelling (including the waste of time that my weekly job centre visit is “have you thought about doing any courses for your IT”…yeah thanks for the jobseeking advice) and the required preparation.
There might be another post assessing my interviews – there is certainly a half-decent chance that I will be offered one of the roles that I went for. For now, I want to set out my plan for January.
I am just finishing the final PHP course that I set myself for December. It will be finished by time I finish this post.
It really was a step forwards from the “essential” course that I did, introducing classes and Object Orientated Programming (OOP) – though I already understood the structure and idea around OOP from my JavaScript learning.
Whilst it makes sense in my head, using it will be another matter altogether, but I do have one PHP-related project that I would like to try out at some point, and one or two small ideas to use elsewhere. Learning is one thing, and I do go through and code everything in the video, testing and debugging along the way. But I know that I will only really start to master it once I have a project or two on the go.
I might still need some advice on how to structure my SQL tables – though I have a very good friend who is very good at PHP that is nagging me to do a PHP project so I know where to go for advice. Hopefully it has given me enough of a grounding in PHP to be able to get my payment system working for my weather forecasting page. Another one “on the list”.
Further to that I have not been able to get SMTP mailing to work through phpmailer. I’ve given up for now in trying to figure it out. But I will figure it out – I always do eventually.
When it comes to PHP, I guess the next step on my learning path is to try to work out MVC architecture.
But PHP is taking a break as for the rest of January I am going to be concentrating on improving my JavaScript abilities.
The first part of my main plan is to complete the JavaScript 30 course, which is a collection of 30 tutorials to create real-world applications in JavaScript – things like making a clock, text shadow mouse move effects and a whack-a-mole game. I am going to expand at least a couple of them – especially the whack-a-mole game for which I have quite a few ideas for.
The second main part is to continue with the Free Code Camp syllabus – I have around 20 algorithm challenges to do, such as Sum All Primes, then 4 advanced projects to do, including making my own calculator and a tic-tac-toe game (I haven’t got the foggiest how to attempt that! 15 minutes later I do have some ideas on how that might work…the AI, of course being the hardest part to tackle).
I doubt I will get all of that done. In fact, I will not complete it all. A vague estimate would be that would take 300 hours to do and I don’t need an algorithm to work out that I wouldn’t have enough time before the end of the month to complete this.
Of course, my time available also depends on whether I get offered a job. I’d like to think that I will employed soon. Although I am coping ok with the 8am starts.
To break it up I might start learning React too. There is a course on Codecademy which looks like the perfect way to start learning it. Knowing React is probably the one thing that would really make me stand out as a potential employee.