Welcome back!  Last week (TODO INSERT LINK TO FIRST WEEKS POST HERE) I talked about my 10,000 foot view of the plan.  Now we’re back to make that more useful and less of a nebulous dream.  So lets get right in to it.

To keep this focused we’re going to do that thing that motivational speakers are always saying. Set goals, and not just any goals, but SMART goals. There’s a whole wikipedia article here if you need the whole break down, but the idea is to make goals that you can accomplish and know when you’ve accomplished them. The short version is:

• Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
• Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
• Assignable – specify who will do it.
• Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
• Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

This isn’t a complicated system. It’s pretty easy to see the goals and advantages of using this as the lens through which you view the goals you set. Though assignable is pretty laughable in a one man show. The biggest struggle I see is definitely the measureable. How do I say when my resume is done? When is my portfolio project ready for prime time? When am I done with leetcode? None of these have clear cut answers, and honestly I don’t have any idea how I’m going to handle them.

In any case let’s get into the nitty-gritty of going forward, and ignore the unanswerable questions for now.  Here are the big bullet point goals as such. In more or less the intended order of intended achievement:

• Portfolio project
• Resume (latex?)
• keep weekly posts on this blog
• Improve face to face under pressure
• grind CTCI/HackerRank/Leetcode

To paraphrase a very smart 6 year old “Oh this is easy, I only have to do 5 things”

So let’s get specific…

The portfolio project needs to be more than just one monolithic app.  Though that’s definitely part of it. I have a piece of productivity software that I’ve been working on to help me keep myself focused on the important tasks, and getting that through to a 1.0 type version is goal one.  I want to have that done by the end of April. This is about a month later than I originally planned, and I don’t love that. But here I am.

I also want to make small things.  Just small proof of concept stuff. I’ve previously seen Jennifer Dewalt’s 180 websites in 180 days project and I loved that idea.  I don’t want to get that crazy with it, but definitely something along those lines would be great.  I have a very surface level understanding of react, and I would like to expand that to have some more breadth and depth.  There’s clearly a lot going on in the library, and honestly the whole of JS for that matter, that I just haven’t had a chance to play with.  

So I have through until the end of April to get through the productivity software, which is going to be a good thing, as I’m going to need about that much time.  Then finishing up the mini projects for May.

S: Get a completed sideproject to present.
M: Get the productivity software to feature parity with Trello so that I can switch to it.
T: By end of April

At the time of writing this I have a job fair coming up in two days, so the first pass of the resume is done.  However I do want to come back to this, and possibly hire a resume writer to get me something that is all around better.  Right now it’s definitely amateur and that’s a little sad.

S: Improve the look and feel of the resume.
M: Seek feedback publically (reddit/SA) and if it’s negative hire a resume writer.
T: By the end of April

Now for the really hard part.  I want to maintain a 1/week posting here on this site.  I have a slew of topics in mind, but honestly this sort of writing is a challenge for me.  Expecting myself to burn through a post in a week is definitely ambitious. However the more I type into my little word document here, the more I find I can do this.  Though I may end up taking a page out of Hemingway’s book for this particular step of the journey. The other major challenge here is the fact that I’m categorizing this time as the same as time to spend on personal projects, or CTCI, or whatever else

Though now that I say that I’m considering splitting it up into one pomodoro of each.  Yeah actually I like that idea a lot. I will definitely be switching to that after this term is up.  

S: Create content that shows that I’m engaging mentally, and how I think.
M: Maintain 1 post every 1-2 weeks here
R: Maybe not on this one, but I want to try.
T: Indefinitely

Cracking the coding interview and then the ensuing hackerrank grind is easy to set a goal for, hard to follow through on.  The goal is simple: Work through all of the CTCI problems, by the end of May, and start working through hackerrank problems starting that same month, maintaining ~30 minutes a day indefinitely.  Doing the thing is easy, doing the thing every day, that’s the hard part.

S: Get “interview ready” with DS+A questions
M: Work through CTCI by the end of may, start working on hackerrank every day starting in may.
T: Starting in may, indefinitely.

Social goals are basically impossible to quantify the actual skills.  I can’t say
“Hit relationship level x with y difficult person” and be able to watch that gauge as it grows over time.  I can’t just give someone a turnip every day until they have a blue heart for me. Thus I think the only way to make this work with a measurable goal is to set an effort in goal.  Perform x toastmaster speeches, go to y improv classes. Something like that. And of course, as the last one, this is by FAR the most terrifying to me. I’m not even to the point where I’m seriously looking at this and it clenches my whole being with anxiety.  So obviously this is going to be one of the hardest. Which makes me want to scale the difficulty down considerably BUT then I, again, lose the ability to maintain measurability.

All of this to say, at the moment I don’t know how to set a good (smart) goal.  I need to not crack under pressure in an interview, and I need to feel more confident in my skills in this area.  But I have no IDEA to do that right now.

S:  Be comfortable under pressure in interview situations
M: ????
R: see above
T: ?????

I’m going to have to come back to this, as unsatisfying as that is for a post.  Because I really don’t have any idea how I get through that in any way.

But overall this doesn’t look too bad.  It’s just small steps every day. Lots of small, doable, steps.  I hope you’ll join me on this journey going forward.