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?
Well, I've taken the plunge and ordered the Manning book iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development. Should be delivered sometime next week. You already know what my idea is so I'll see if I can make any progress towards realizing that.
ReplyDeleteI also got a new book on creating a REST driven API in .Net 3.5 (mostly for work) but that should be interesting as well and could be useful for creating a data-driven iphone app.