It’s been over a month since my last post. To be honest, I was never good at documenting my self-studying progress. All I can do is to show the results of my course projects and a few side projects in my still under construction portfolio. But, even if it’s a month passed, a lot of things happened, not just with my code learning journey, but even life itself.

As many of you know, a brand-new pandemic has disrupted daily life early this year. Only this time, it spread so fast that the entire world has been greatly affected. I used to hang out at the local coffee shops to do my self-made bootcamp courses and make/practice some digital art, but because of the mandatory shelter in place that started early March here, I’ve been doing my self-learning at home. I even dabbled into some non-tech hobbies, like getting back into mobile games and occasionally watch some Asian dramas on Netflix and Amazon Prime with my mom. I also started going back to doing adult coloring books again, sketch journaling ¹, and also started going back to refreshing/learning Japanese again.

Open Source Contributions

I also started to get in touch with the meetup groups I’m part of. I admit that I haven’t been active because it was difficult to find time to travel out to the cities ² during late hours. Now that we’re all at home, keeping ourselves safe from the pandemic, I’m now able to become more active since everything is online.

One of the first things I’ve done so far is being able to make my first open source contribution to one of the local non-profit organizations that support low-income women and non-binary folk through tech/coding education, Techtonica. Because they’re still in their current cohort, the only thing I can do to help out was to contribute something to their curriculum. I was assigned to be as one of the reviewers of the Python to Javascript conversions and to also transition their Command Line course from Bash to Zsh³. I’m still a noob with Mac and still a noob with the Command Line in general, but I’ve gotten myself familiar with Zsh while I was setting up OS Catalina months ago when it was first released. Because Catalina now uses Zsh as their default shell, I had to read and learn about it, at least the basics, on my own. Right now, the Zsh course is still pending review, hopefully it’ll be completed before their next cohort. Maybe I can join their cohort too, since I’m also unemployed.

My local meetup group Tech By Choice is also rebooting their curriculum development program. We might as well because everything is online now. Sometime last year or the year before, I submitted a proposal to open a basic WordPress course, with notes and such. I thought about submitting another proposal on Markdown, especially if we’re also going to teach non-tech savvy individuals on how to blog. Not only that this is for blogging, but also for those writing documentation on platforms such as GitHub. I think teaching enthusiasts Markdown can also be beneficial as well.

I don’t have any solid on the job experience with coding in general, so to speak, but making more open source contributions really does help me build up my resume and simply show employers that I have some experience, even though I’m not getting paid for them.

I also signed up to do some contributions also for MDN Web Docs and probably do some for WordPress documentation too. When I do get better at coding/programming, I’d be able to contribute more towards the code base, rather than just reviewing/editing any form of written documentation. Let’s see where this will take me?

Conclusion

I’ll write a better, well-documented blog entry next time, with better notes and better insight of what I’ve learned so far.

1. I don’t have much to sketch to be honest…
2. In this case, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, etc.
3. Z Shell