Cover Image: “Desk Office” by Liam McKay/ CC0 1.0
Crying and Impulsive Decisions
It’s currently almost 9 PM at the time of writing this, near the end of the day. Last night, I cried a little in bed, being so frustrated with how many of the internships and entry-level jobs seemed just out of reach for me: a specific skill that I should’ve had here, x-amount years of prior experience there.
The grayscale mode that I’ve set my phone to seemed to accentuate this glum mood, and I set my phone on Do Not Disturb mode to (re)read my story, Saviors, in silence, since it’s a story that gave me peace when writing. That lasted for an hour, and I was drying my tears and trying to sniffle quietly with a blanket over my nose.
But today, I woke up with a better sense of purpose. And the day before yesterday, I had a spark of motivation kindled by the current protagonist I’m writing in Konvert; any obstacle she faces, she eventually overcomes, and understands. An agent of chaos in the way that chaos is entropy, and entropy is change.
What I did today was not that eventful, however.
I let myself succumb to the endless barrage of dopamine hits that Instagram wonderfully provides, and before long, I find myself wasting a great deal of time on the app. Today, I considered deleting the app and my personal account to start anew with just my Aistrex and study page. I got very close — I removed my bio and name, and then switched my profile picture to the mischievous Fyodor (from the Bungou Stray Dogs series) doll:
The doll is charming. It simpers.
Deleting those things seemed to help though. It made my account look unorganized, so I think that effectively made me not want to use it so much.
Things Done
I did manage to do some productive stuff today, though. On Udemy, I finished Module 3 of Imran Afzal’s Complete Linux Training Course. So far, it has been actually quite fun to work in the virtual machine using CentOS with the video course. The colorful terminal and the cute noise made when you backspace when there is nothing to be backspaced is delightful to me, and I wish I knew how to do that in the Windows command prompt.
Of course, no day would be complete without me staring at YouTube for a couple of hours, and this is further exacerbated using YouTube Premium, which I’d found out a few months ago that I was really paying a premium price while having subscribed through the iOS app, and not with the student discount.
However, sometimes it does give me good stuff. I watched a little bit of this video:
I’m not in the same place as her, but I told myself I need to take matters into my own hands if I’m to get anywhere. I’m grateful to be attending WGU for that since it’s self-paced for the most part, and I could take a 1-3 month term break after each semester, but sometimes college isn’t enough. I should’ve known that, as a person who was so adamantly against going to it just a few years ago.
Perhaps the fusion of that gusto from the past and the knowledge of now are going to help me. Looking for a part-time job that’s not food service or retail has been a struggle, but I imagined that it would be so. Therefore, I decided to finally post something so I could put myself out there on the Internet. It harkens back to my high school days at percymeetsarcheage.wordpress.com, but back then, I had a little more anonymity. I know more people now. And I’m not seeking to be too anonymous on here.
App Academy Open
From that video, I saw a website called App Academy. They have a full-stack curriculum that is free, called App Academy Open, along with paid bootcamps.
I’m in the very first part, called “Learning at App Academy”. There’s a section called “Documenting My Expectations”, so I decided I’d jot down that here.
- I’m seeking to put in about five or six hours of work a week on just App Academy. For the Linux course on Udemy, I’ll try to do about an hour a day. Combined, that’ll be two hours a day minimum.
- Since I’ve gone through some of the basic programming concepts I don’t imagine that the App Academy course will be too difficult to follow. The things that will be are learning JavaScript thoroughly since I’ve never touched JS and some of the DSA material. The other things don’t seem too bad, so I’m not worried.
- However, with how they broke up each section, it seems like you could hypothetically do one small section a day since most seem to be 2-4 hours long.
With that done, I’ll go watch the short video later.
Expectations for this Website
I understand the love for destinations. I look at tour websites a lot. And I’d love to travel everywhere, sitting in a lounge chair on a sunny beach, under an umbrella, with a book in hand. Unfortunately, I don’t have the spare change to be doing that right now.
Cliché as it is, the journey is more important than the destination. While the portfolio end of the website (and any related websites that I decide to link) are going to be that “destination” end, this blog will serve as a medium for logging the journey.
I think it’s important to track your growth somehow. Blogs won’t be all numbers to me, but I’ll look back a couple of years from now, and hopefully shake my head at how worried I was in a time like right now.
Writing Style
You can mostly expect a style of blog posts written similar to something like this. It’ll vary on what other things I’ve been exposed to, as my art style does when doomscrolling on Instagram for three hours a day.
I will try to not make it overly technical. If I catch myself doing so, I will do my best to simplify it. The Feynman method or something, except I don’t know if you’re going to commit what I blabber on here to your memory.
The narrative aspect for me is more important, as well as the understanding and uncovering of the many topics programming and computer science entails. Life is a story, so I want to write a little part of mine as one.
Until Next Time
I just wanted to give an introduction as to what I am doing. I am very excited to potentially meet new people through here, as I did with my old game blog.
I think the future will be bright.
