College Break

I’m on a one and a half month break from college and I continue my HTML and CSS course of theOdinProject. I’m actually surprised it doesn’t actually take too much of my time to complete the lesson part of the course. I started in late November and finished all the lessons in early January. It takes roughly one and a half month to complete 68% of the course. The rest 32% are from the project part of the course.

Back to College

College break is over. Since then, I’d finished most of the HTML and CSS courses, I started to work on theOdinProject’s JavaScript and jQuery courses. I’ve finished a lot of lessons now and started to do little experimental projects. I also started pushing projects’ solution to theOdinProject’s GitHub site. It feels really nice that after months of feeling stupid, I can finally make something and see my work visually.

After I read Twitter Bootstrap’s documentation and Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript book, I realized that I’ve actually reached my original goal of doing theOdinProject, which is to be able to read technical resources on programming. It’s amazing to remember that just one year ago, I tried to read Django documentation and get stuck without understanding anything. And now, here I am, blazing through docs and books I’ve never dreamt of reading two years ago.

College Break Again

College is over! After using all my time to learn enough so that I can pass the exams, I finally have a lot of free time. I’ve done almost all of theOdinProject’s courses minus a few lessons that I skip here and there. I’m currently learning the optional lessons of JavaScript frameworks and libraries.

This college break, I set up an experiment to see how much I could read in just 3 months. It turns out that I can read about 20 pages every day (600 pages per month).

I finished reading the Code Complete book (Yes. That big book… The second edition…). I read most of The C Programming Language and I agree with the author of Learn Python the Hard Way, that it’s not really a good book to learn C from (many unreadable idioms). Luckily I’m also reading Code Complete while I read it, so I know that the code there is not really a good example to learn from.

I also finished reading the Refactoring book. I think I’m a bit too inexperienced to learn much from this book. I’d probably need to review it again once I get some more experience with object-oriented programming and design patterns.

I also read some chapters from the CLRS’ Introduction to Algorithms 3rd edition book. I read chapter 1 through chapter 12. I read some of chapter 13 (Red-Black Trees) and some of chapter 22 (Elementary Graph Algorithms).

I also read a lot of the Mythical Man Month book. I’d probably finish it next year.

Back to College Again

I didn’t learn much about programming in this period of time (September through December). I need to get 3.5 average scores this semester (because I’d be taking a lot of courses next semester). And so I study hard for my college. I did learn operation management (MRP, ERP, etc.) and Management Information System which is related to technology. And my hard work actually pays off, this is the only semester that I get one B+ (all the other grades are either A- or A).

By the way, I stop using theOdinProject in June 2016. I figure that since I can make pet projects on my own and since I’ve fulfilled my goals with theOdinProject (such as the ability to learn from docs, technical books, and online tutorials), it’s time for me to leave. I’m forever thankful for all the people behind theOdinProject.

Side Notes

I started experimenting with the GitHub Pages and Jekyll to create a static web page. I plan to use them to host my pet project, blog, and personal website. They don’t have any backend capability, but it’s not a problem since if I ever need a backend, I could just hook GH Pages to a Rails app.

I’ve finished reading Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts. That book helps me a lot in organizing the messy JavaScript note that I write as a reference. My first impression is that the book is really thin, which is nice. I’m actually glad that I read some discrete math on the side since if I don’t, I’d probably get intimidated by the first chapter of this JS book which covers the topic of JS Grammar.

I also learn some Underscore.js. I’ve tried to read all of the docs but quickly found it boring. So, I decided to implement the solution of the first five problems of Project Euler first in vanilla JavaScript and then in JavaScript plus Underscore. I’ve already known some of Underscore’s methods in Ruby and Python, but the way they make my codes cleaner and clearer still amaze me.