May 2023 – Nithin's Blog

Breaking down my technical skills goals – Full-stack

Me hacking the mainframe after learning all these technical skills. Source: “Hacker Stock Photo” by devdsp is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In this post, I talked about the three technical skills I wanted to learn: SQL, Full-stack, and QGIS. In this post, I talked about some things I’ve accomplished. Today, I’m going to break down my full-stack learning goals to hold me accountable.

Course Breakdown and Pacing

This course has 13 parts. Each part is supposed to take around 15-20 hours, or about a week. I’m working part-time until June 9th, so until then I’ll plan on doing one part a week, with a week buffer.

After June 9th, I’ll plan on doing 1.5 parts per week, since I won’t be working and will have more free time.

For Part 1 – 4, I’ll consider each section complete (and will not move onto the next section) after I’ve completed all of the non-starred exercises, as per the course instructions. For the remainder of the sections, I’ll consider a section done when I’ve done 75% of the exercises.

Based on that pacing, here’s what I should accomplish each week:

Technical skill learning update: switching to projects

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I wanted to learn three new technical skills this year. The reason I want to learn these skills is that I’ve identified roles that interest me that require these skills.

In this article, I’ll share my progress on these goals, the obstacles or I’ve faced, and some solutions I propose to address them.

Q2 Language Goal Update

In January I set some very ambitious language learning goals. I wanted to spend 120 hours this year studying 5 different languages.

By this point in the year, I should have logged 40 hours of language study. As of 1/28, I’d completed ~2 hours of study. Since then, I’ve logged 2.25 more hours of iTalki lessons, and attended two language meet-ups (~3 hours total). I’ll log an extra 2 hours of reading time.

That brings my total up to 9.25 hours. I’m more than 30 hours behind where I should be at this point in the challenge, and I don’t think I’ll meet my goal by the end of the year. In this article, I’ll talk about the obstacles I’m facing, how my understanding of myself has changed, and propose some updates to my goals to better match these changes.