Do you know you have 99/100 Google Page Speed score? Fix "Compressing http://mez.cl/a/ could save 1.4KiB (59% reduction)." and you're good.
Due to a personal project I've been quite obsessed with Google Page Speed lately and this could be the 2nd website I've come across in the wild to have a 100/100. Shoutouts to https://principles.design/ being the first one.
Thanks for the tip, this is indeed something I'd be proud of :)
I decided arbitrarily to make every post self-contained inside a single HTTP request, and it's nice to see this single decision is already 99% of the job.
I have a few: complete my transition to management, help my wife double the revenue of her side business, be consistent about my workout routine and lose another 50 pounds.
Get my personal finances in order. I have no debt, a good savings going, and a decent chunk in a 401k from a previous company. Other than that, I have done basically no investing and I know I'm leaving money on the table.
What real estate do you have? I bought a home but the only benefit I see is that some of the money I used to spend on rent now becomes equity (but not all).
I'll skip the usual suspects. I successfully made several positive changes this year. I'm going to improve upon it further next year.
- Launch the webapp that I'm working on. I plan to do it in January.
- Be mindful, especially of how I spend my day. I made https://crushentropy.com/ to make this easier. It has been working out great. I can see that my productivity has gone up, my attention isn't scattered, and I feel more content by the end of each day. I'll do more of this in 2018 and add more related habits and routines.
- I read 33+ books so far this year: https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/ This is my current personal best and I'll try to beat this in 2018. Most of the time for this came from cutting back on Hacker News and Reddit, which don't relax me as well as reading a book for 30min does.
- I couldn't travel as much as I wanted to in 2017. I plan to compensate for this in 2018 ;-) I also plan to hike, snowboard, and play racquetball more than I did in 2017.
This is the year I'm finally going to learn front end, just enough to prototype. Don't roast me alive, but I'm thinking of starting with jQuery. It seems much more learnable for a web stack beginner, and probably serviceable for a long time to come for someone who mainly prototypes ideas that need an elemental gui.
In my experience, jQuery isn't so much a tool that you learn in its entirety, but a swiss army knife you pull out when needed. It's among the most heavily referenced web libraries on SO and the like, making it pretty easy to find answers with a "______ jquery" google search.
I would learn react or angular first. I think the barrier to entry is the same (depending on your background) and you will get much more out of it.
Beyond that, I would suggest learning how to take a psd website design and turn it into HTML. This is a great skills to have. Adding functionality on top of the HTML with react or angular is easy once you know how to break a website down into digestible pieces.
That being said, it is your resolution. I'm not trying to force you into anything. Just giving advice from my experience.
I think jQuery is better for a beginner because there's less stuff there. It's closer to learning raw HTML/CSS/JS, which will serve you well in the future, once the next thing replaces react/angular.
You can also just drop a single CDN URL into your web page without worrying about a JS dev environment, which is not simple to set up these days. That stuff is useful eventually, but I think it's distracting at first and obscures the fundamentals of how the web works.
jQuery is more of an afternoon thing.. 1-2 days and it's mostly mastered. You just need to know how to use selectors.. and the most common methods like html(), ajax(), post(), get(), text(), css(), addClass(), removeClass(), toggle(), -- but really just being able to select an item on the page, and then google what else you need to know for what you want to accomplish...
I'd recommend learning VueJs -- It works well with laravel, not sure what backend you've worked with but I'm sure you can plugin any.
It has a LOT of articles/support online. There's a discord chat for more help. Learn the basics of jquery for sure (I still use it a ton) but something like Vuejs or even React would beef up your resume quite a bit.
Graduate my PhD and get hired in industry. Hopefully in a job that affords me enough leisure time to work on personal projects, of which I have many cooked up but undeveloped at this stage. Exercise more regularly.
I decided to note on a daily basis what I learned over the day. To commit to it, rather than being a note in a note book, I made it as a blog[1] on which I post daily. It is badly written and really incomplete but as it is mostly for myself, I have no issue with it.
The ultimate goal is to see what I learned over a year so I can better appreciate the progress I made, rather than only base my retrospective on feelings. It might also be useful to find what I learned but can't put the name on it, or find links to interesting things I found several months ago.
To help staying focused, I decided to fix goals and rewards. The first reward is on January 1st if I haven't skipped a single day from when I started.
1. Read a book a week. This is doable if i dedicate an hour a day to reading and I pick books that end up being page turners.
2. Play my electric guitar for an hour at least every other day.
3. Put $1000 a month away in my savings account.
4. Learn to implement some basic computer science algorithms in JavaScript. I don’t know how to do binary trees or hash tables and I’d like to be able to teach them at the Javascript fundamentals meetup I run once a month.
I don't want to assume your financial goals but you might want to talk to a financial planner before just sticking it in a savings account. Unless this is a repository for cash you need short term and with immediate access this is the worst place to put it.
My boss just recommended a tax person to a bunch of us new hires- we're all 1099 contractors. He said basically the same thing as you. I want to start doing things like maxing out Roth and Sep IRAs, or whatever will end up making sense for my position.
I’ve found that committing to a single meaningful word for the year works better than resolutions.
Two years ago the word was “space”. I made more room in my life for growth and change that year.
This year the word was “presence”. I went on quite a personal development journey and being more present, particularly with my emotions and physical body, was definitely a strong element of that journey.
For next year I’m thinking of breaking my rule and having two words, because it feels like they will work best together: “patience” and “flow”.
I’m curious if anyone else can think of a word that seems to be calling to them this coming year.
Given what I started and how I've been thinking, maybe "aware". Being aware of what's happening around me, of the thoughts I have, of the progress I make, doing the mental process of noting things rather than being passive about what's going on. Does that make sens?
Maybe, but I see "aware" as noticing things external to myself as opposed to "conscious" or "present" where it has a more spiritual, intra-personal meaning.
Or maybe I'm not understanding the terms the right way as I'm not a native English speaker and may put concepts and meanings from my native language into these terms.
Slow. This will span many years for me. Check out [0]. Applying slow to reading, thinking, eating, etc. invariable leads to good results. It is also a great heuristic.
Also things inimical to slow are usually bad: social media (esp twitter), most politics / religious debates, advertising, tv and radio, etc ...
Create more tiny habits that pair onto activities I already do. Mostly Exercise, sit ups every time after I brush my teeth, stretching every time I press snooze on the alarm clock.
I’ve wanted to improve my yoga practice (especially balance) for awhile, so I started doing trees and other one-legged balance moves every time I brush my teeth. I don’t remember when I started, but it has made a big difference! I can now hold poses that were impossible for me to perform at the beginning of the year.
I developed some good habits over the last few months such as a more balanced savings/investment plan, quitting Facebook and practicing yoga three to five times per week, so I’d like to continue those consistently for the whole year.
These changes (plus others that I had already made within the last year or two) have left me feeling the healthiest that I have felt in years, both mentally and physically. I feel so much less anxious and more in control of my life, my asthma no longer troubles me and I have lost ten pounds.
Building my current project into a profitable business. I've been pushing myself completely out of my comfort zone with this one, can't wait to see how far I can take it.
I'm hoping to make a concerted effort to both meditate and journal every day. I began meditating this past year, and it has been a surprising boon to my overall well-being.
I'd love to get a job in NY writing React, I'm currently employed in Philadelphia and a move to the NY area would push me out of my comfort zone drastically. Hopefully I'll be able to achieve it by June.
74 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadDue to a personal project I've been quite obsessed with Google Page Speed lately and this could be the 2nd website I've come across in the wild to have a 100/100. Shoutouts to https://principles.design/ being the first one.
I decided arbitrarily to make every post self-contained inside a single HTTP request, and it's nice to see this single decision is already 99% of the job.
- Launch the webapp that I'm working on. I plan to do it in January.
- Be mindful, especially of how I spend my day. I made https://crushentropy.com/ to make this easier. It has been working out great. I can see that my productivity has gone up, my attention isn't scattered, and I feel more content by the end of each day. I'll do more of this in 2018 and add more related habits and routines.
- I read 33+ books so far this year: https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/ This is my current personal best and I'll try to beat this in 2018. Most of the time for this came from cutting back on Hacker News and Reddit, which don't relax me as well as reading a book for 30min does.
- I couldn't travel as much as I wanted to in 2017. I plan to compensate for this in 2018 ;-) I also plan to hike, snowboard, and play racquetball more than I did in 2017.
Best of luck in your front end journey!
Beyond that, I would suggest learning how to take a psd website design and turn it into HTML. This is a great skills to have. Adding functionality on top of the HTML with react or angular is easy once you know how to break a website down into digestible pieces.
That being said, it is your resolution. I'm not trying to force you into anything. Just giving advice from my experience.
You can also just drop a single CDN URL into your web page without worrying about a JS dev environment, which is not simple to set up these days. That stuff is useful eventually, but I think it's distracting at first and obscures the fundamentals of how the web works.
I'd recommend learning VueJs -- It works well with laravel, not sure what backend you've worked with but I'm sure you can plugin any.
It has a LOT of articles/support online. There's a discord chat for more help. Learn the basics of jquery for sure (I still use it a ton) but something like Vuejs or even React would beef up your resume quite a bit.
I tried my hand at React, it's doable, and I like it for a prototype, but I'm going to try Vue.js next because it's supposed to be much easier.
Angular is supposed to be easier for people coming from the backend.
In any case, frontend development is very frustrating (at least for me), a lot work for little gains sometimes.
The ultimate goal is to see what I learned over a year so I can better appreciate the progress I made, rather than only base my retrospective on feelings. It might also be useful to find what I learned but can't put the name on it, or find links to interesting things I found several months ago.
To help staying focused, I decided to fix goals and rewards. The first reward is on January 1st if I haven't skipped a single day from when I started.
[1] https://today-i.netlify.com/
What did you use to set your blog up (language/framework/web-builder)? How long did it take you? It looks nice.
[1] https://gohugo.io/
[2] https://netlify.com/
[3] https://forestry.io/
[4] https://github.com/GuillaumeRochat/today-i
2. Play my electric guitar for an hour at least every other day.
3. Put $1000 a month away in my savings account.
4. Learn to implement some basic computer science algorithms in JavaScript. I don’t know how to do binary trees or hash tables and I’d like to be able to teach them at the Javascript fundamentals meetup I run once a month.
I don't want to assume your financial goals but you might want to talk to a financial planner before just sticking it in a savings account. Unless this is a repository for cash you need short term and with immediate access this is the worst place to put it.
2 activities that helped me greatly. Once you read and solve enough problems, then you will start noticing patterns while understanding their purpose.
For starters, I'm in the middle of a complete blog rewrite (running away from WordPress), using: Hugo and Bulma.
I'm also upgrading my fullstack tech-stack to: Elixir, Phoenix, Vue.js, Ansible. Used to do: Ruby, Rails, Angular.
Get back to drawing something every day. Preferably the big comics projects. But anything is far better than nothing.
Two years ago the word was “space”. I made more room in my life for growth and change that year.
This year the word was “presence”. I went on quite a personal development journey and being more present, particularly with my emotions and physical body, was definitely a strong element of that journey.
For next year I’m thinking of breaking my rule and having two words, because it feels like they will work best together: “patience” and “flow”.
I’m curious if anyone else can think of a word that seems to be calling to them this coming year.
Or maybe I'm not understanding the terms the right way as I'm not a native English speaker and may put concepts and meanings from my native language into these terms.
Also things inimical to slow are usually bad: social media (esp twitter), most politics / religious debates, advertising, tv and radio, etc ...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
Edit: things that slow me down the most are classical music + jazz (mostly piano or guitar solos) and mathematics.
A TED talk by BJ Fogg on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKUJxjn-R8
These changes (plus others that I had already made within the last year or two) have left me feeling the healthiest that I have felt in years, both mentally and physically. I feel so much less anxious and more in control of my life, my asthma no longer troubles me and I have lost ten pounds.
But seriously, nothing major. I just want to incrementally improve my writing, coding and health and reading.