Alright, so technically he’s a Zuniceratops and not a rubber duck… but he still counts! 😅

I’ve been soaking in the various LinkedIn Learning classes since the last update and working on one of the more interesting Farmhand tickets. It’s probably not the best idea to try and learn ALL the things at once but it’s a lot of fun to jump between topics.

LinkedIn Learning

I’m waffling between keeping this subscription and swapping over to a Udemy one,

I’m running through a few of the basic classes, the fun part of being self-taught is always wanting to reinforce the foundations. As you can see from the list below, I’m also hopping into a few of the soft-skills/productivity courses as well.

• Building Resilience
• Migrating from React to Angular
• Getting Things Done
• Succeeding in Web Development: Full Stack and Front End
• Docker for Developers
• Learning Groovy
• Building Monorepos on GitHub
• Programming Foundations: Design Patterns
• Craft a Great GitHub Profile
• Programming Foundations: Object-Oriented Design

I’ve got a bunch of things queued up, so hopefully the next update will include a bunch more in the ‘done and dusted’ list! 😁

Books!

Right now I’m slowly working my way through Java 8 in Action, with Effective Java and CSS in Depth waiting in the wings. I was hoping to get through a book a month, but January’s been a little chaotic (whee!).

Textbooks (or textbook-adjacent things) are always a slightly harder slog for me than videos or running through tutorials on the web. Still, they’re a great resource and I’m going to stubbornly keep churning.

I made it through Clean Code last year (both the hardcopy and the audio book) and it makes me wish for more audio to listen to while I’m doing other things, like art or decluttering.

There was a post on podcasts that went by recently on reddit, and I’ve got an itch to start digging into those…

Projects

So many projects, so little time!

I’ve decided not to chase a Java certification after talking with folks at work, instead I’m going to focus on building things instead.

I started up a new Java-Spring Boot-Angular project, this time with a PostgreSQL database, to handle my microbusiness crafting inventory. I’m trying to focus more on TDD with this project, so I’m going slow. I’ve got the database setup and a very very basic backend… now time to test the heck out of it! 😂

I’ve also dug out all my old notes for GetPut Adventures and have done some basic exploratory work into the shape of the WordPress plug-in that I’ll need to build. It will probably also require a custom theme, but for now I’m going to focus on getting the ‘backend’ working.

I’ve gotten permission to post about the Farmhand tickets I’ve been working, so look out for some fun rambling adventures that way in a bit!

My work on The Odin Project slacked off a bit, but I’m hoping to polish up the last of the Foundations section this week. It’s just a rough overview of things I already know (so far) so it will be interesting to see how the next section goes.

TL;DR

I’ve made some decent progress this month digging into things, but I’ve got a lot of things in the backlog.

Monthly or bi-weekly updates look like they will work a lot better, so I’ll focus on those for now (instead of trying to pull this off weekly). So the next update here will be sometime late Feb. 🤔

I’ll be focusing on the details in the project update posts and more of a ‘things are generally going thusly’ with these posts.

So, onwards! 🎉