3 Great Decision I Made In My Second Year Of Teaching Myself Programming

Publish Date - 21st October 2022

Last Updated - 3rd Feb 2023

Finding something you love to do for the sake of doing it, is true joy.

I cannot stress this enough. Programming is the only thing I can do for 10 hours straight. In this second year of programming I expanded beyond Javascript and programming.

Here are the three great decisions I made

Scratching My Curiosity Itch In All Things Programming

Software Engineering is not about writing code.

There are many associated fields and disciplines. I was curious about all them. I wanted to know what they were and how to do them. Over the year I learned:

  1. A strong understanding of version control (Git and Github).
  2. How to use, operate and deploy to a Linux Linux Tools server (and use Nginx) - more on this later.
  3. How to create and organise config files
  4. Vim (used for everything other than Common Lisp) and Emacs (Used for Common Lisp Dev)
  5. How online Authentication works.
  6. Build, setup and manage a PostgrSQL Database (I already know SQL from my Finance days.)
  7. When to leverage immutable data structures & funcional programming
  8. React/Next.js Frameworks

Started To Learn Other Languages And Use Them In Production

I was also interested in other programming languages. If you remember, this is the Peter Norvig 10 Year Challenge. Learning many languages was part of that. So I:

  1. PHP - Rebuilt frosty in PHP. This was quite easy. I didn't use it. I don't like PHP :)
  2. C Programming - Very basic but I learned how to create command line tools in C. C is a fabulous language.
  3. Common Lisp - I went deep here. I spent 10 months writing Common Lisp. A very different language than C, PHP and Javascript. Common Lisp is my favorate language.

Used An Ubuntu Computer As a Day To Day PC For 4 Months

I am a self proclaimed Extreme Learner. I cut myself off from using my Mac for 4 months.

Everything is different in linux. But Linux Linux Tools is important for web developers because we deploy with them. I needed to know how it works so I could be effective.

I also wanted to stay away from products like Heroku. My logic was simple, if I learn to do it at the source (the bare ubuntu server), then I can control the whole process.

After 4 months (Jan 22 - April 22), I switched back to Mac. But now I know how to use and configure Linux Linux Tools well.

See other posts in this series