Just Ship It

Last week was a bit of a whirlwind. I slammed through most of my backlog in Skillcrush's Web Developer Blueprint course and published two (imperfect) sites:

The url for this site is about to be swiped for my Rails Rumble submission. I'm open to ideas for a better (more fitting) name for this brainstorming site. Also on the to-do list is to get set up with asset hosting on AWS so that the images uploaded along with the ideas will be saved! (Image storage on Heroku itself is strictly ephemeral!)

and...

This resume-splash page was for an assignment on Skillcrush. I've got two main to-dos for this site. First, optimize the image better so that the background isn't so slow to render. Second, it looks terrible on a mobile screen in portrait mode.

I need to figure out how to tell the css to drop into a different mode when in a really small screen.

I'd like to continue my streak and ship another page this week. Not sure what yet (likely a starter page for my SeaGL talk this month.) Finally, I'm throwing in my hat for Rails Rumble - registration starts on October 6th and I'm super stoked to be a part of it this year.

Oh, yeah, and I've got my "day" job at [company name retracted due to uber-restrictive social media policy].

It's going to be a great week!

Edited to add:

I completely forgot! I also (finally!) got around to signing up at exercism.io I've just started but it's so much fun! :D

Leaping into the World of APIs and Data

I am taking a flying leap and creating an entry for GitHub's 3rd Annual Data Challenge. My topic: The Six Degrees of Baconjs. Much like the movie-buff parlor game, the premise is simple: in six degrees or fewer, you can connect every user on GitHub (users who have at least one contributions/contributor outside of their own personal repos) with any other.

I have never attempted anything like this before. From the 10,000 feet view, given an input of a user, I will need to query for a list of all contributors to the Baconjs project and work backwards through each of their other repos to find the next degree's list of users. It's going to be recursive and strange but lots of fun!  I'm starting my studies of the first step with the GitHub API docs and the terrific tutorials on Codecademy. They even have one specifically on the GitHub API!

Wish me luck! I'm going to need it!

Dancing With My Fear

I, along with several million other people, read Seth Godin's blog. He writes every day, sharing his nuggets of wisdom to anyone who's willing to read them. Confession time: I often catch myself in a comparing another's middle to my beginning (a great nugget from Rebecca Garcia) trap. But that's a lost for another day.

I just finished a little blog playlist with Zen Habit's advice to writers, Seth Godin's piece called "How To Get Rid Of The Fear" and I'm now listening Denise Jacobs on  Hanselminutes on building the creativity muscle.

Leo Babauta's piece focused on how to get past procrastination, face the fear of discomfort or hard work or inadequacy and getting the work done. Then Seth Godin's piece was a reminder that feeling fear means you're doing something worthwhile. And Denise Jacobs was the kick in the pants reminder that great artists work everyday, painting or writing or practicing, whether they're "inspired" at that moment or not.

So, here I am, writing (Swyping, to be frank) this blog post, practicing shutting up the critical mind, writing a blog post. Feel free to check out the links above. You might have a different reaction.