Dev Journal: Feb 5/16

After the most recent onslaught of posts on my blog, some might have wondered if the habit would continue. Sadly no. But since then, I’ve started up a new term at UoPeople, been actively looking for a new job, and recently started a YouTube channel as well.

Why not start with what I’m doing in school? I was temporarily laid off work, and it seems it might be a while before I go back, so I decided to take advantage of the time and enroll in two courses this term; Databases 1 and Web Development 1.

Web Development feels sort of pointless for me, but I’m trying to make the best of the situation and look for things I can take away from this course – even if it’s just ideas for how I can teach web development myself.

Databases on the other hand, has been a pretty interesting course so far. I’ve found during the last two terms that I know more about databases than I thought I did. However, I’m also learning a lot of terminology that I didn’t know.

In Databases 1, instead of “table” we say “relation”, instead of “row” we say “tuple” to mention a couple. It’s been interesting to learn the mathematical notation behind joins and unions too.

So school has been going Ok, but what about work?

This is the first time I’m bringing it up officially on my blog, but I’ve been laid off from my last job. I thought it was intended to be a temporary layoff but it’s been since the weekend before Christmas and it’s not looking like my boss will be able to hire me back anytime soon.

So for the past couple weeks I’ve begun actively job hunting again. I’m applying to a lot of different places, but I’m hoping to get into something that is more focused than I was doing before.

My old job I was developing websites in OpenCart, WordPress, various static sites in straight HTML/CS and jQuery, smaller sites with some PHP, and larger ones with custom back ends built in Laravel. That and doing basic sysadmin, database design, meeting with clients, scoping projects, writing tutorials for clients and doing updates on old sites… I was spreading my abilities quite a bit.

I really hope to find a place that is more focused on a narrower set of technologies and also I’d much rather being making web apps, rather than websites for the small to medium sized business market.

I do enjoy making small websites, but I don’t feel like they challenge me enough. Actually writing programs is much more exciting to me than coding HTML/CSS. The problems of styling and layout are just not as rewarding to me.

Aside from that, I also finally started a project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time – and that’s starting a YouTube channel.

After talking shop with a friend for a while we both brought up the idea of making video content. Long term we both hope to make some solid online courses that would actually cost money, but for now we’re using YouTube as our play space to get the practice.

So we started a channel called LemonBracket. At the time of this writing we have two videos posted so far.

The one posted by my YouTube partner, Jake Klassen, is an introduction to the command line:

I also posted the first entry to an introductory web development series:

Our goal is between the two of us to have a new video every Monday. Some weeks you might see higher production value than others, but we’re determined to have something to post every week.

So that’s it! School is going OK, I’m on the job hunt, started YouTubing, and of course, I still plan to keep blogging!

If you do check out those videos – please leave us a comment, give the videos a like, and don’t forget to subscribe if you want to see more.

Cheers,

Dan