Starting Projects
I got to my desk this morning and I looked really hard at my computer screen. I glanced at all the tabs that I had open for the different things that I’m trying to wrap my head around.
iOS - A huge motivator for me. Learning to develop for the Apple ecosystem has been a goal for many years. I spent a LOT of time this year working on that goal so I could get an app into the app store, but still not there yet.
Chef - This was a very recent deep dive into Chef because of how I see our industry going. I see change coming quickly, and I want to stay ahead of the curve. This also helps satisfy my desire for development by writing out code for infrastructure. Still lots to learn here as well.
Ruby - I decided to dip my toe into Ruby so I can better understand Chef and maybe even contribute back to the community. This is something else that I have wanted to do for a long time, help give back to open source projects or even create one myself.
Keeping up current skills - I’ve been a Cisco person since almost the start of my career and that company has been very good to me. It has opened up doors and opportunities for me. Over the last four years or so I’ve been a pretty solid NetApp person. I really like the company and the culture they have, and with the recent SolidFire acquisition they have really brought in a DevOps focus to the company that I think is really forward thinking. Yet, with learning new skills…there is still keeping up with the old ones. And when you get into Chef, you can’t automate something you don’t understand. The good news is I understand the data center and how the servers, network, storage, and OS level stuff interacts. Chef makes it pretty simple (relative term there, simple for me I guess?) to tie these things together and get something that you are able to test, validate, and repeat.
Two of my projects are code related. One is something that I am really passionate about learning and really desire to finish writing an app in. But I have to wonder why I can’t seem to finish working on an iOS project and get some idea created and out into the wild. It doesn’t have to be ground breaking and make millions of dollars and sell to some other company to make more money (which would be amazing but I set a realistic expectation here) but something simple and useful to someone? I think my problem is being able to design UI/UX and coming up with that useful idea that hasn’t been done a million times.
With that, here is my plan. Prioritize my projects and give each one equal share throughout the week. I don’t have to kill myself to work on each of these every day for an hour but I do want to give them time without my family suffering to much from it.
Right now, Chef and Ruby will take center stage. I want to get some awesome Chef stuff out there and learn Ruby to start giving back on open source projects that support that language. But twice a week I’m going to start digging back into my iOS challenges and get a project going agin. Now, to put that on the calendar so I can actually make that happen! :wink: :smile: