Hello, World!
I mentioned in my first post this year that one of the things that I commit to do, starting this year was to share updates about myself, every month. The reason why I am doing this is because I would like to remain consistent in having an attitude of constant learning. By writing this post, I am able to have a platform to keep track of where I am at this certain point in time, I have a commitment device to complete what I started learning about, and at the same time, I hope that people that will be reading this post may be able to pick up something valuable.
With that, this post marks the first of many posts where I will share to you what’s going on with me every month.
What I am grateful for
To start this year, I would like to express my gratitude to God the Father, through his Son Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit for His sovereign grace and mercy, for the guidance, protection and provision that he has blessed my family and friends throughout 2020. I am very grateful that there’s no one whom I know of personally was taken away by the fatal effects of COVID-19.
I would like to express my thoughts and prayers as well for those whom I may or may not know and lost a love one in a very difficult time like this.
Life Updates
Joining a new company
This January 2021, I joined Createur as a Senior ReactJS developer. Createur is an independent digital agency based in Sydney, Australia.
What am I learning about?
Shopify development
The main thing that I am learning about this month in connection to my work is to learn how to develop with the platform of Shopify. For those who do not know, Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows merchants to setup an online store.
My initial impressions to the shopify platform as a front-end developer is it’s pretty easy to develop with as compared to other e-commerce platforms like Magento. However, the only thing that I dislike about so far is you cannot fully develop a theme without having an internet connection. Personally, it’s a minor thing that I am willing to put up with.
Overall, I am impressed with what I learned from their developer docs and I am looking forward to go beyond theme development and build apps to integrate with the Shopify platform.
Data Structures & Algorithms
Last year, I discovered about Leetcode and decided to test myself and know where my programming skills are so far. When I worked on one of the problems in Leetcode, it was an humbling experience for me as I failed to answer the problem. When I did some research, I discovered that one of my weakness as a programmer is computer science fundamental knowledge of data structures and algorithms. With that, I did research for a learning resource and I ended up choosing these learning resources to teach me this subject:
New programming language
One of the goals that I set for this year is to learn a new programming language that I find interesting and something that I will potentially commit to in the long run. That programming language is Python. I chose Python mainly because I am interested in learning machine learning and according to my research, there’s a vast ecosystem of libraries made in Python for machine learning. Other than machine learning, I am genuinely interested as well on building web applications using it, with Flask as the framework of my choice.
Fundamental & Technical Analysis of Stocks
Back in 2019, I started my investment journey. One of the major goals that I was able to accomplish was to invest in the stock market. However, I hit a major bump in the road, when my original investment amount to the single stock that I invested in(due to hype from social media facebook groups 🤣) lost 40% of its value. The good thing was that I was just testing the waters during the time and the amount wasn’t really big. Thankfully, the pandemic also opened up opportunities to buy stocks at a low price. With that experience, the stock market is indeed no joke. Thus, I decided that if I wanted to be a good steward of the money that I invest, then, I need to learn how to take advantage of the stock market to grow it. With that, I learned that one way to grow your money is to learn fundamental & technical analysis of stocks. To share to you, here are some of my resources to learn about fundamental & technical analysis:
- COL Financial - Basic Technical Analysis
- InvestaUniversity Lessons
- Investopedia - Fundamental Analysis
- Investopedia - Technical Analysis
Learning Music Theory & Piano
Being a guitar player for about 14 years already, I spent my time mostly on learning and covering music from famous artists. Last year, I had a realization that I wanted to compose my own music. As I was trying to create the music that matches the melodies of the songs that I had in my mind, I had a hard time going beyond the major and minor scale. With that, I identified that for me to make the music that I want to produce, I need to learn about music theory. In addition, not only did I want to learn music theory but I am also learning how to play the Piano at the same time. If you are interested, here are my main learning resources:
What am I reading?
Atomic Habits
After reading from James Clear’s article about focusing on creating systems, rather than goals, I realized that everything he shared in his article makes sense. With that, I was interested in learning more about Atomic habits which is building blocks of the systems that sets a person up to reach their goals. Reading this book so far has helped me improve a lot of the things that I do on a day-to-day basis.
After I finish reading this book, I will share to you what I learned. 😉
NodeJS In Action
The area where I struggle with over the past years as a front-end developer was with front-end tooling. I identified that the cause of my struggles in doing configuration with these front-end tools is my lack of fundamental knowledge with NodeJS.
With that, I chose NodeJS in Action as my book of choice to learn about the fundamentals and capabilities of NodeJS, alongside with the NodeJS docs.
Pragmatic Programmer
Starting this 2021, I made a commitment to read at least 1 classic programming book that is generally recommended in the software engineering community with the intention of growing further in areas in software engineering that I have no idea about. By doing a little bit of googling as to the best books for software engineers, the Pragmatic programmer is one of a few books that’s always recommended by developers to those people that were asking the same questions as I do. With that, I chose this book as my first general programming book to read for this year.
Interesting articles that I found recently
- My year in data - I thought it was impossible to do this until this person did it.
- Contentment vs Complacency - One of the questions that’s floating in my mind in the past year was, is it possible to be content while not being complacent.
Wrap Up
That wraps up this my updates for this Month.
This coming Friday, I will be publishing the part 2 of Let’s Build: HTML5 Development Server & Build Tool With Webpack. The next tutorial will teach you how to add CSS support, featuring PostCSS and TailwindCSS in our development server.
Hi! If you have any questions, suggestions, corrections, or constructive feedback about this post, please let me know. I will greatly appreciate it!💯