9am, not the quietest start to my new journey – our next door neighbours are getting their bathroom tiles replaced, so my first work day begins with the sound of loud hammering resonating through my home office. Thank goodness for noise cancelling headphones!
Spent most of the day planning – figuring out what I wanted to achieve, learn etc; and also the things I need to get done soon to help me on my way. I’ve also started looking around at start-up and small business networking activities in the area, so that I can start making contact with like-minded individuals who are trying to do the same thing.
In order to keep things structured I am going to schedule the work I do as weekly sprints, at least to ensure I’m achieving all the things I want to. So far at a very high level I want to ensure the following activities are included:
Every Day:
– Exercise
– Blogging
Every Week:
– Prototyping and application development
– Networking – in the Dublin start-up and software development community
– Brainstorming – continuing to spend time thinking up new concepts and ideas
– Learning
○ Software tools
○ Development practices
○ Technologies
That’s at a very high level, and so the next step is to create a back-log of work items so that I can focus my prototyping and technology learning activities. One other important thing that I need to do over the next week or so is to figure out my ‘compass’ – what are the values, wants and needs that orientate me; and based on this what is my personal mission statement. If I can get a clear idea of this, then it will help guide me, and inform the decisions I make over the coming months.
Just to ease myself back into development, I spent the last couple of hours of work in the evening dusting off a prototype web application that I have been tinkering with for a month or so. More on this later, but I am planning to use this as the test bench for a lot of things I want to play around with. It is a single-page web app written in Angular 2, talking to a set of web services. I want to use this application concept to gain experience in a number of areas:
– Writing complex JavaScript / TypeScript and Angular 2 applications.
– Creating a microservice-based server architecture.
– Machine learning and data analytics.
But for now I spent the rest of the day trying to understand server-side URL rewriting in order to get the Angular 2 app’s routing working properly…
