blog/learning

I had a very busy spring and summer this year. Since then, I, along with my clients and collaborators have being doing post-mortems on some of these projects and trying to figure out how we can improve our processes.

What follows is an outline I drafted for an improved process.

It's been a busy, busy few months and with paid work on the go it's been hard to keep up with my personal portfolio page. I've learned so, so much more as an independent contractor than I ever did in school. With a few regular clients and a couple of mentors I've been blessed with numerous opportunities to work in a variety of frameworks and see the software architecture of a number of big projects.

When looking for instructions on how to accomplish something in Javascript I inevitably find that someone else has already found a solution. But when I try to figure out how they did it, all I see is a wall of sparsely documented code that seems like overkill for the problem I'm trying to solve.

I've dabbled in web development before. I've also dabbled in object oriented programming before. I'm a dabbler. After a brief reintroduction to HTML5 and CSS3 I was off and running, and within a couple of days I was impressing myself with what I could achieve. I fully expected JavaScript to go just as well, but it's proving to be a little hairier.

Six weeks into my WebDev course I am amazed at the volume of online resources available to me. It shouldn't be surprising that the web community has a web presence but the number of plugins, e-books, frameworks, code libraries, etc makes it hard to know what topic to pursue next.