There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen
You’ve probably seen this quote tossed around a bit this year. For almost half the year, I quarentined in my apartment.
It’s easy to forget that quite a lot has happened. Despite being in a pandemic, this wasn’t my most stressful year (and I’m very fortunate for that!). Like for many, the year has given me a lot of time to reflect on the world and myself. So here’s a long rambling self indulgent end of year post.
The first part of the post will be web stuff and the second part will be personal stuff.
Web design #
In July I took Andy Bell’s incredible 11ty course and created my first portfolio! Here’s version one
I didn’t understand collections so a lot of the site was hard coded with good 'ol HTML. BUT I had just finished the FreeCodeCamp Responsive Web Design Course, so the HTML was more semantic than previous hacked together sites I’d made. I’d discovered pseudo elements and might have gotten a bit too carried away, the same could be said of transitions. For the design, I wanted to challenge my self and use mostly standard web colors. I know the colors look like mystery meat but I really like the pink/purple combo. This was also hosted on Vercel. I think I stopped using it because there was some 11ty file it stopped rendering (🤷). The current portfolio is basically a refractored and evolved version of the original.
I didn’t really appreciate Andy Bell’s course though until I started working on my personal site. A personal site isn’t the same as a portfolio. It’s my own space so I feel I can be a lot more experimental. It’s ok if it’s not accessible because I’m working on it. It doesn’t have to have the best load times. It’s a place for making mistakes. I don’t have to worry about it breaking and I don’t have to worry about the content I put on it either. A lot of the blog posts and projects (like Healy Icons) are very self indulgent and wouldn’t be proper for a portfolio. I think now more than ever it is important that people create a space for themselves (whether it’s a diary or a blog) where they don’t feel the pressures of others.
Here’s the first version of my blog:
It’s very clean but imho lacked a lot of personality. The personal site has ballooned since then. Maybe discovering collections was a dangerous thing. The goal for the personal site has slightly changed also. It’s not just a playground for learning things like Tailwind, it’s also to fulfill my obsession with logging my thoughts on everything (i know, very narcissistic 😈). I’m thinking of starting a coffee collection ☕. This current iteration ditches UIKit in favor of being ultra CSS controlling…vanilla css all the way (this is actually bc I can’t seem to get Tailwind to work)! I also wanted this version to be jam packed with personality so there’s a lot of emojis and pictures of things I really like (food and coffee). The overall layout is heavily influenced by restaraunt menus.
Non Web Stuff #
I accomplished a few goals I set out for myself. Let’s start with the small:
- I finished one web course in its entirety (more accurately a subset of a course. It’s FreeCodeCamp).
- I read more books this year than I did last year! They are:
- Flatland by Edwin A Abbott
- Animorphs books by KA Applegate:
- The Visser Chronicles
- The Andalite Chronicles
- Wintersmith by Terry Practhett
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie
- Silence by Shusaku Endo
- The Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
A great benifit of reading is it supposedly increases your attention span and also ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. It also is an activity that isn’t in front of a screen (I prefer reading paper rather than digital). I loved reading as a kid and lazyness (choosing that path of least resistence-aimlessy browsing on my phone) often got the better of me so I read less as an adult 😞.
- I made both a portfolio and a personal website (it’s this one!). The internet likes to take already existing ideas and brand them as something new like the second brain. Scroll up to read my verbose incoherent thoughts on making them.
- I am writing more! Maybe not once a week but absolutely a lot more.
- Learned to cook! Still not great but I am getting there
And the big goal is I switched jobs! I’ve had this job for 6 years so It’s odd to leave. I’ll write a longer post about my thoughts on this.
Here are goals I’d set out that I’ve not accomplished that’ll roll over to the next year:
- Reach b2 level in French (I’m still very much so A1).
- Adding comments to this blog
- Complete the free portion of CodeGym and DataQuest
- Relearning discrete math
- Running consistently and having a mile time of 8 minutes.
- Gaining muscle (I’d llke to be 110lb)
The worste part about the pandemic is not being able to see anyone. I went on a bike ride with my SO’s parents and also went to the farmers’ market a few times with my friend but there are many others who I’d love to see that I haven’t seen in over 8 months. Some a year.
My goal for next year is to be better at taking initiative to hanging out with people. I need to get over myself and stop waiting for people to ask to hang out with me and actually do the stressful thing of reaching out first.
Anyway, see ya’ll on the flip side!
Image from Unsplash. Lizard by Selin Sahin. The image is a callback to the first Animorphs book, which featured Jake morphing into a lizard.