Scott Spence

Scott's Digital Garden.

Code life balance

Just some rationalisation of what I’m currently doing.

Recently I have decided that I’m going to improve my current skill set. To do this I’m studying with freeCodeCamp for a full stack developer certification, I’m also trying to learn as much as I can about the languages that come with that HTML, CSS and JavaScript as well as getting familiar with everything else in between like Git and GitHub, development environments like Cloud9 and services like Digital Ocean and AWS.

To do all of this I need time and being married with a young family and having a full time job my time is at a premium.

The freeCodeCamp curriculum is 2,080 hours, so let’s break that down quickly.

Like I said with a full time job and a family spare time is precious, I have taken to getting up most mornings around an hour earlier than usual @~05:30 that gave me around 1.5 hours before having to get ready for the day taking kids to school and the daily commute. In the evenings I usually have from 20:00–22:00 but this is full of interruptions so you could probably condense it down to about 1.5 hours again.

gollum

So.

Let say I’m lazer focussed and relentlessly do 1 hour in the morning and 3 hours in the evening 4 hours a day 2,080/4 so 520 days? That’s 1.4 years, wow! Ok now let’s be a bit more realistic, 1 hour in the morning 1 hour in the evening, 1040 = 2.85 nearly 3 years, oh!

Ok, so what if I was a full time student? 8 hours a day 1,080/8=135 three months! How much do I want this then?

Currently I’m managing 45min-1hour in the AM then 1hr-2hrs in the PM so at very best I could manage to finish the curriculum in a year, that’s if I finish the curriculum at all, I read loads of posts about how people have managed to get full time developer jobs after only doing half of the freeCodeCamp curriculum this doesn’t help. It’s great to see success stories and inspiring to read but a lot of the time this adds unnecessary pressure on yourself.

My family are great and understand the situation but your relationships are priority and they can get a bit strained when all you’re doing is staring at a monitor whenever you get a spare 45 minutes.

fccbreakdown

[#100DaysOfCode] has been a great tool for me with regard to building good habits and something that has both distracted me from purely concentrating on my freeCodeCamp and also accelerated my GitHub open source interactions. Since starting the challenge I have contributed to several GitHub projects and made some of my own.

I have also created a personal goals repo like the one Una Kravets has on her GitHub this will be what I’ll use going forward after I have completed the 100 Days of Code challenge, I’m not going to take part in the 301 days of code challenge as I’d like to go on holiday without having to think about any coding for a week or so.

I often think if I am a proper developer and what am I doing all this for, then I take this handy little quiz:

http://amiarealdeveloper.com/

We shall see where I am in a years time 👍