STARTING MARCH 1ST I’M EMBARKING on an ambitious project which, in equal measures both excites and terrifies me.
Some background: Last Summer I enrolled in a Coding Course to reskill as a full stack software developer. As I near the end of the course, I’m finding it quite difficult to land my first developer job – not an uncommon scenario for new graduates.
Rather than sit and stew, polishing my portfolio with endless style edits, I want to use the time I have to plug the gaps in my knowledge.
I wrote my first line of code in June 2019, so I’m still very new at this. Starting a new career at the age of 37, (old dog, new tricks?) and swallowing the bitter pill that I’m competing against hungry, fresh grads a decade and a half younger than myself, is pretty sobering.
So, I really need to up my game to get noticed.
When I say ‘up my game’, I don’t mean the type of passive ‘learning’ derived from sitting through hours of tutorials, connect-the-dot codealongs, or readings countless forum blogs – all of which have their place of course, but I find that, as applies in most skills, the doing is the most effective way of learning.
Inspired by the site of Jennifer Dewalt, I have concluded that I need daily accountability and to work on projects that I’m passionate about to improve my coding skills.
Jennifer created 180 websites in 180 days. She taught herself to code. Many of the projects are (relatively) complex for a beginner. Some, as you’d expect, are very simple. But, throughout the 6 months (!) she was exposed to a bunch of different technologies, which certainly would have grabbed the attention of recruiters/employers and, as it transpired, the media. Win-Win!
So what’s your plan?
I’m going to create a new website every single day until I land my first developer job.
How long will that take?
It could take a week. It could take a year. Whatever the case, daily practical application is the key to improving my skill. God knows I’ve learned that lesson the hard way, a year after returning from Colombia (Adios Spanish!).
What will you create?
Right now, I don’t have a job. Therefore I can dedicate a typical 9-5 working day to these mini-projects. I want to choose things that I’m passionate about. For those who have followed my blog, you’ll know that I love writing. So, I’ve decided that every site I build will be influenced/connected to my series of dark humour short stories – ROT.
An example: In Book 1 (Origin of the Feces) the protagonist Ray Jones, is flushed down the toilet while in pursuit of a tooth. (If you haven’t read the books, this can be hastily explained by the fact that Ray is a rogue tooth fairy who rips the healthy teeth out of children’s mouths for a tidy profit). One idea could be that I create a little site where the visitor can pull the flusher and watch as Ray spins around and is flushed away.
What I want to do is tie the books to the project, which I’m calling The Daily Rot.
At a later date, I’m going to embed links in the actual Kindle books to the project site where readers can engage with the characters and scenes, which hopefully will make them enjoy the story line even more. The sites won’t take away from the plot – they’ll just make them more fun and visual.
As for those who are simply interested in following my coding journey, they’ll be exposed to the books and who knows, they might enjoy the ROT World I created.
So how is it going to be structured?
Every day, until I land my first developer job, I’ll be posting a new Rot-related site to a special section on my Portfolio Page. I’ll also share some brief detail about the scene in the book that inspired it, what I was trying to accomplish, etc.
Each day I’ll be working to a deadline to complete and submit my project to the world. It might look terrible. It might not work. But I want to push myself to create code quicker and, to get technical for a sec, improve my coding languages (specifically Javascript and Python).
The code will be made publicly available on my Github. I have loosely estimated that each short story (6 in total in the ROT collection) has around 10 mini-projects, so all being well (or unwell as the case may be and I haven’t landed a dev job!), come May 1st, I will have created 60 sites in 60 days.
Not as prolific as Jennifer Dewalt, but there’s nothing to suggest that I can’t continue beyond that, especially if I’m enjoying it.
But you don’t have any more stories beyond ROT 6…
Well observed Holmes. But given the great reception and reviews that the stories have received in the last two years, I would love to re-enter that world and create a bunch more.
An interactive, immersive ROT Universe that you can read about, play in and characters you can engage with. Now, THAT is my kind of escapism.
You can check out my Portfolio site, the ROT books, and the project page below.