I want to change careers to work with computers, and I want to do it before I hit a decade with my current position. This gives me about twenty months from January 2024. I'm not sure if that'll be in the form of IT or programming or gamedev yet, but this page is a catchall to try and get me to encourage myself to get back into the swing of more actively learning about computers.
2024-03-03: I dusted off my old App Academy Open account and pulled the old repo where I kept my notes and exercises. I've started working through the SQL exercises because I'm realizing that's a pretty big area I need to work on. It is deeply boring but that's just how it goes with these things sometimes.
2024-02-21: Finally had an excuse to learn how to work javascript into a webpage today and figure out how to use arrow notation in function calls. Also got around to figuring out how to add listeners to components. I made a little image gallery viewer for my daily gacha drawings to have somewhere else to put my drawings since every art hosting site seems to go down the toilet. Also because I saw an image gallery on someone's old personal website a while back and thought it was charming.
2024-01-12: I dusted off some of my old bookmarks today and skimmed over a little bit of the teach yourself comp-sci website. Scrolling through the section on programming, it mentioned that you can't learn programming without doing a bit of it, and it directed me back to Leetcode. I kind of always preferred Codesignal's site when it came to problem-solving and test-cases so I went and worked a few problems over there. A lot of the ones I ended up working today were just like "do you understand the modulo operator or integer division". The question about adding a border around some text could've definitely been done a bit more cleanly, but I haven't quite grokked how to really get the most out of reduce/map and the like in Javascript so I just kind of hit the problem with for loops until it went away. Maybe I should go and dig up my old leetcode account and solve some problems until it looks less embarrassing. I dunno. Anything to get me to stop playing gacha games all day, really.
oh right I also started trying to get back into gamedev. I went and compiled Aseprite and threw together a quick design doc and fucked around in Godot for a bit yesterday. Man, it sure is easier to start working on something when you have a clear plan and know what steps you need to take to start getting there and aren't just making every single decision on the fly.
2023-12-29: My brother pointed me to Cisco's Skills for All the other day so I started working through that. It'll probably be a bit before I get much of anything out of it, and it seems like the main thing I can get out of it is going "here is a certificate issued by someone who isn't me saying i know what a computer is". I finished one of the basic courses and will start on another one soon-ish. The one I finished was just a basic sort of "do you know the pieces of a computer and how they fit together? Do you know the difference between a tablet and a smartphone? Do you know what a mobile hotspot is? Do you know the difference between USB, SATA, Molex, HDMI, DisplayPort, etc". At one point they had a lab about disassembling a computer and had questions about the jumpers on the hard drive and it just seemed bizarre. SATA drives don't use those in any of the cases I can think of, and M.2 drives don't have those. It felt like a question out of time. "Are you disassembling your old Windows XP machine that came out before you started developing long-term memories? Okay, so that big ribbon cable on the back is called a SCSI connector, and you need to put the jumper -- okay so a jumper is that little plastic bit that goes over a couple of the pins to short them, and by shorting them it lets the computer know what data to prioritize when resources are scarce." I'm sure this knowledge will be useful at some point since there's probably still some places that only really need spreadsheets and word processors that are still running Windows XP or 2000 but I can't say I have any computers with SCSI or IDE or PATA drives lying around my room right now.
And then let's see what else. I spotted a page called Teach Yourself Computer Science while I was looking around the internet, and that seemed pretty neat so I chucked it in my bookmarks. I look forward to SICP breaking my brain and burning me out on programming for another year again.