Epic FAIL

I failed. Even though I have plenty of valid excuses for not completing the Flash course, I'm not going to use them. The lesson I'm taking away from this is that I'm always going to be "too busy" to better myself, but if I truly want to do it I have to make the time to do it anyway. I didn't do that.

I hope everyone else did better.

iPhone Acquired!

Quick post from new iPhone! I figured if I'm going to develop for this
thing, I should know how to use it and what it needs. So far, I like
it and have come up with a couple ideas that people would want (or I
would at least). Back to the books!

A New Perspective

I was chatting with an old friend from my LAN party days and we were relating on how we handle our past; namely, our failures and how they drive us today. He's a bit older than me, wife and kids and all that jazz, and he offered me a bit advice. His words:

[At some point], you just start to take a different look on life, and the older you get, the more mellow you get. So if it's the drive that fires you now, use up the fire while the fire is still hot because eventually... it dims.

Let's keep it burning.

Meet the Challenger: Jared

Guess I should introduce myself. I'm Jared, System Admin by trade, but I've always had a love for programming as well (especially web development). I met Alec back when he was an impressionable young lad and we did some video game "journalism" together, frankly outshining our cohorts by a wide margin before moving on to bigger and better things. Thanks to the sterling example I set forth back then, I like to think that I'm at least partially responsible for all of Alec's many successes and none of his failures.

I signed up for the Challenge because I've reached a point where advancing my programming skills isn't a big priority at work, and I hope this gives me the motivation to start learnin' again. I've decided to focus on Flash via a totally not pirated in any way online course, with the goal in the next 30 days to simply become familiar with Flash as a platform and get some of the basics down pat (forms, scrolling text, etc.). Long-term I'd like to develop something useful at work (or for my own site) in Flash, as well as develop a simple point-n-click adventure game or maybe even dabble in casual game development.

So that's it for me. The 1% progress is because I figured out how to start the course and viewed the intro...the real learning will follow soon. Good luck everyone!

Day 2 in the Trenches

I'm through fifty pages. I sped through chapters one and two and then three came along, introducing classes, objects, and methods and that took a little bit of time to comprehend, but I'm happy to report that it's making sense. This book is designed like my high school text books, concluding chapters with exercises to reinforce what you just learned and I think they're helping me quite a bit. I've also forced myself to type out the code examples by memory to hopefully scar my brain tissue with that information.

My total study time has been about 3.5 hours at this point. I'm waking up at 6am, putting on a pot of coffee, cruising a few Mac sites, and then crunching until it's time to shower and go to work. I wanted to come home last night and jump back in, but it doesn't look like I'll have the mental or physical stamina to do so, so mornings is where it's at for me. Luckily, with an 11 to 8 work schedule, I should have plenty of time.

Where you at?

Aaaaand... WE'RE OFF!

The clock's struck twelve and the first-ever 30 Day Developer Challenge is officially underway. Progress meters have been reset to zero and I've already cracked open (and consumed) a bottle of BAWLS to commemorate the event.

I'll check in later today and give a quick update on my progress. I encourage you to do the same, even if you're chickening out. Be a man and take the walk of shame, at least. For the rest, change starts now.

Look, Progress Meters!

In the past when I had set a goal for myself, I would often make a list. As I crossed off items and visually see the progress I was making, it'd motivate me to push myself right up until the end. Hoping to take advantage of that kind of motivational impetus, I installed some fancy-looking progress meters for us on the right sidebar.

I've turned on admin rights for each of you so when you're logged in and looking at the main blog page, you should see little screwdriver and wrench icons next to each sidebar gadget, indicating you can edit them. Click the edit icon for the progress meters, scroll down until you see something like, $('alecbar'), replacing alec with your own name, and then edit the value under it to indicate the progress number you want to show.

Of course, it'll be up to you to decide how you'll want to factor your completion percentage. For me, my goal is to get through this Objective-C 2.0 book, which is 500 pages even. So for every five pages I can get through and comprehend, that's a 1% gain towards my goal. At the end of my day, I'll come here and adjust my progress meter accordingly.

Welcome to the 30 Day Developer Challenge!

For years, I've been catching lucky breaks finding work as a front-end web developer. The fact that I'm sustaining a family with just the knowledge of something as basic as XHTML and CSS is ludicrous and I certainly shouldn't expect for this to last forever. I've always thought that I'd love to learn this or learn that, but due to either laziness or lack of free time, I never do. If you're in the same boat as me, I'd like to present an opportunity to change that.

I offer you the 30 Day Developer Challenge. I think it's time to dig ourselves out of our own ruts and begin the personal advancement of our knowledge base and, by extension, our lives. Let's escape the tyranny of salaried employment and begin building the foundation of financial independence.

The 30 Day Developer consists of my techie friends. We've all talked about the things we want to learn, yet always put off. Let's not do that anymore; let's find a book or download a video tutorial series and dedicated a portion of our day over the next month to learning a new language. Set up a plan, track your progress and share it with the rest us here, and hopefully, through group participation and encouragement, we can motivate ourselves to that next level we've all been hoping to reach.

As I've been alluding to for days now, I want to develop for the iPhone. For me, step one would be to learn Objective-C 2.0, which is why I ordered this book. I'm going to slot a minimum of two hours a day, every day, to reading this book; that's just 20 pages a day. Completely reasonable.

Please, accept the invitation to create your account here, make an introductory post about what challenge you're taking, and let's get it started. The journey begins January 12th, 2009. Are you in?