Day 3: Piling things onto my TODO list

My main focus today was to work on my blog. I deployed it to netlify yesterday (thank you to the former/current apprentice(s) for the recommendation), but it was a very simply blog theme. Today I worked on making it prettier :).

I also met with my mentor, Peri, today. We went over my self-assessment and starting talking about my areas of focus for the next two months. My first area of concern is tooling. When it comes to git, vim and bash, I only know the things that I needed for my University projects. I never quite understood why I was doing the things I was. Then comes testing. The idea that was engrained in my head by my professors is to write tests before you write code. This is something that was always emphasized, but never enforced. Since I was eager to solve the problems, I RARELY did this. And by rarely I mean once or twice. As a result, I never learned how to write good test cases. There were requirements for our test cases to break the instructors' buggy code, but these were often completed last-minute, and therefore with little consideration.

The language I chose to learn is Haskell. I have some experience with functional programming but not enough to be comfortable with it. I think learning Haskell will be a challenge for me as it is for many people accustomed to, well, anything but functional programming.

So, to kill three birds with one stone, I will go through a Haskell book that has exercises and incorporate tests and tools when possible.

When this all gets overwhelming or boring, I intend to read The Software Crafter and a book on public speaking (More on this later).

Now, time for a day off. How convenient that I started work on a week with a public holiday :) - though this was completely a coincidence, I swear.

Since I spent a little more time on prettifying my blog, I will work on adding it to the HolidayCheck Apprentice page on Friday.

Ciao!