One of the most difficult things for me was keeping up my motivation while learning how to code. My biggest solution to this was something I learned from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and that was a four quadrant chart separated into:

• Important and Urgent
• Important but not Urgent
• Not Important but Urgent
• Not Important and not Urgent

I used to write this chart every day as a way to manage my time but I focus on the first two now and created two todo lists. The important and urgent category is always the priority but I further split the last one into easy wins and hard wins because those are the challenges you can be flexible with it.

One of the things a lot of people have suggested is taking a deep dive into programming, program 10 hours straight per day to quickly reach the 10,000 hours for mastery mentioned in Outliers. That mindset disregards burnout and that is especially discouraging for a beginner. It’s one of those cases where the process is much more important than the goal because of how overwhelming programming can be; there are a lot of things to learn, it’s important to be able to decide what abstractions are ok to work with as is and what topics are uncomfortable enough to stretch your abilities without breaking your motivations. Easy wins and hard wins is a way I manage that. I focus on harder problems but I would do something from the easy category when I knew that I needed a little break but also stay productive. It’s very important though to make sure that everything in that category is still important to make sure that it’s not another form of procrastination.

Example grouping for the categories

For me, the important and urgent category was filled with services I’m paying for which included Treehouse, Codeschool, Upcase, and any other online subscription or working on an app I can show as a code sample in the future. The important but not urgent category had two subclasses. The easy wins includes learning a single command, an easy code kata/exercise, or reading a chapter for a programming book. The hard wins include reading source code to figure out how a method works, learning a design pattern, or learning a new tool like a text editor or tmux.

Commands I learned recently

• sudo update-alternatives --config editor The default editor for my laptop was nano and I wanted to switch to vim.

• When I was working on Windows 8 and Vagrant, I used a program that GitHub provided. I knew a handful of commands but I’m trying to learn enough so that I won’t depend on the GUI.

• git branch -a This list all the branches for a git repo.

• git branch -d branch_to_delete This deletes a branch.

• git remote add origin remote repository_URL This adds a remote repository I can push and pull to.

• git blame directory/to/file.rb I learned this from Justin Weiss’s blog post and it’s been useful to track down changes in git’s history.

Links

• Postgres management A lot of the things in this article is taken care of by rails but I wanted to learn more commands in psql so that I can poke around the database when I need to.

• Migrating Rails to Postgres I knew how to set up Postgres but this page also added how to migrate data from sqlite to postgres through the taps gem.

• Adding blog to a rails app I followed this article to add a blog into a rails app that uses markdown syntax.

• Brakeman gem I was seeing this gem a lot in different blog posts and I wanted to try it out. I still need to learn the warnings and what they mean but I was able to fix unsafe redirects and cross site scripting with the first pass through.

• Setting up email in rails This article went through how to set up emails in a rails app through Gmail or Mailgun. I went through the first part and I want to see how to set up the other in the future.