Some things to consider:
- What do you envision for your career?
- What do you want your 2nd and 3rd jobs to look like?
- How do you want to be involved with the Turing community? The greater developer community?
- Where do your passions lie?
Goal: Receive and sign an offer by June 1 at the very latest.
- Design a 40-hour "work week" that provides time for:
- Code (ideally, 2-4 hours a day will be dedicated to coding)
- Outreach
- Research
- Network
- Any other areas where you'd like to grow How much time will you spend on each? When will you do each thing? Based on what you outlined above, create monthly, weekly, and daily goals in order to reach your big goal.
Month 1 Goals:
- Redesign Peter's website
- Read and work through Eloquent JS
- Finish the React.js course that I started
- Finish the technical interviewing course that I started
- Do technical interview prep work daily
- All featured class projects are on Heroku and functioning correctly
- All featured class projects have excellent readme files
- Review Ruby concepts daily
- Include weekly playtime/experimentation with Processing
Daily Goals for Month 1:
- 2 hrs of https://reacttraining.com/online/react-fundamentals
- 2 hrs technical interview prep (cover questions, coding challenges, CS fundamentals)
- My main "barriers" in the job search are usually not feeling like my portfolio/projects have enough of the type of work I need to show for the listing, hating writing cover letters, and feeling not as confident as I'd like to be about doing live coding challenges in technical interviews. To overcome those barriers:
- Get in the flow of sending out 2 high-quality job applicatons per week, including cover letters. Once I get in the flow and settle on a writing pattern that I am happy with, they become much easier for me to write.
- Realize that depth of work wins out of breadth, and really focus on polishing projects that make the basic shine. Be disciplined about applying to jobs that I already have the skills to do well, rather than trying to do too many things poorly.
- Practice problem-solving approach out loud, at home. The speaking through the problem really trips me up the most, so getting used to speaking out loud while working through the problem will go a long way to help.
- Imagine that it's 5 years from now - what have you accomplished during that time? How is your life different? What steps did you take to achieve your goals?
- Finally armed with the creative and technical skills I always wanted, I think life in 5 years is going to be totally awesome. I see myself in a leadership role at work primiarly, with a thriving side project. I see myself coding for fun and side projects primiarly, which will help keep my skills sharp and give me the technical knowledge to be effective and respected in a leadership role. I will have gotten there as a result of finally letting my creative/expereimentalist/driven/enthusiastic/teaching tendencies run free. I will have created an impressive body of online work simply through writing and finding creative ways to teach technical concepts, which will also help feed the desire to get involved in conference speaking. I want to differentiate myself as a leader who leverages the power of technology to help solve real-world, difficult to face problems, rather than issues that only exist within a bubble of privledge.
- Continue to monitor all job boards, meetup message boards, WWS Slack, etc. and reach out to anyone who is searching for a contract developer and/or take steps to get a referral.
- Make a list of local small businesses I could pitch Wordpress dev work to and reach out to them.
- Fix Peter's website so that I have another good example of a WP site to demo.
- I plan on continuing to attend Code for Colorado project night Meetups (every Monday evening from 6-9) to contribute to their open source projects.
- I would also like to contribute to the Processing community in some capacity (either Processing or P5.js). I plan to start by tackling a bug report as this seems like the best excuse to dive into and research a new codebase.
- Research at least 3 conferences I'd be interested in attending:
- TBD
- TBD
- TBD
- Send talk pitch to one potential conference every two months.
- Send one "aspirational" cold-outreach email per week, i.e reach out fan-girl style to someone who has an awesome job or has contributed to an awesome project see if I can grill them about their work.
- Write 1 technical blog post per week.
- Tweet at least 2x per week.