Not much happening around here right now. I took a little break from personal projects to work of some art/drawing. I hadn't done any of that in a while so I wanted to dive into that for a little bit. Mainly I was getting some sketches together for a local art event called, "Paint The Streets" that was held in late June. I did work hard and was pleased with my results. No awards though. However, I was sore for about 4 days.

When it comes to web development, I've been mostly working on stuff for work and then just some tiny little things on Codepen and doing a few API related tutorials.

I realize I haven't been posting lately and we are, at this point, more than half through the year so I thought I could look at the goals I made at the beginning of the year and see how I'm doing.

Initial Goals and How I'm Doing

  1. Being patient and kinder to myself. As expected, I'm still struggling with this. I know I did go off the rails at least once with an html email project. Generally, I haven't lost my temper too much or beat up on myself way too much. I think the times I did, I was tired and was in a rotten mood becuase I hadn't got much sleep and was sore/hurt. I still need to work on this though - a lot.

  2. Continuing my JavaScript path. I can say I'm getting better. I'm feeling more confident and am solving more JavaScript related problems at work and building in some more functionality based on requests from clients. I can think of a couple little things I did for clients recently. The first one was displaying search results in alpha order. The other was building date parameters into a slider carousel so the client can display specific slides based on date.

  3. Being more consistent with my projects. I was doing good with this but I was starting to feel a little burnt out on it. Lately, I have been taking some time for other hobbies like art, looking for a cardio boxing gym, doing some hiking meetups to try to meet people and be more social outside work. Because of this, the work on personal projects in the past month has been sporatic. Generally though, I have been doing good with this.

  4. I haven't got rid of the old website but I did remove a lot of features from it. I removed the form becuase I don't want people contacting me through that site and lately I've been getting a lot of spam. Essentially, the homepage features some old blog entries from when I used to ride my bike around St. Louis. I'll probably keep the site as an archive of these.

  5. I haven't started any sort of persoal project with C# or Python yet.

  • Working with APIs
  • Tab focus on navigation dropdowns
  • Playing with an JS animation engine called Zdog
  • Playing with a JS physics engine called Matter.js

I'm not really working on the Gatsby site for the cat. There was another Gatsby thing I was working on becuase I was thinking of doing another blog. However, I think I'm going to scrap it because I just don't want to make the time for another blog. I barely make time for this one.

I haven't done anything with Vue yet.

Assessment

I have been more kind to myself but I still need to work on this issue. I feel like I'm making progress with JavaScript. I've been consistent with personal projects but have accepted that sometimes I need breaks to do other things. I haven't removed the old website but I haven't becuase there are some aspects of it I want to preserve after all.

I do need to try some new things like Vue, C# or Python though. I'm not sure I can do all but I should try one by the end of the year.

Other Thoughts

I know most of my focus is on JavaScript but I've been trying to incorporate more CSS Grid, SVG, animation and interactivity into things I work on too. In addition to all of that, I've been working on a lot of accessibility things for work but not really implementing much on my own sites/projects out of pure laziness. I do find I still get confused about certain aspects of accessibility. I think it's important that I work on that too.