5 Days of Daily Themes in Review

Every 5 days to maybe a week, I plan on reviewing my previous "daily themes." I want to do this to track how it's working out, what I've covered, where I've fallen short and so on plus give myself some more outlook on what to work on.

Overall, I'd say it's been fairly productive these past 5 days, and fun. Here's a brief look at what happened:

• Wednesday, May 26th - Blog Post discussing the idea behind Daily Themes
• Thursday, May 27th - Guitar Practice (also did some coding)
• Friday, May 28th - Coding, learning Gatsby + Shopify
• Saturday, May 29th - Reading/Studying (Git and Repo Study)
• Sunday, May 30th - Drawing Focus

I started a habit of making a one-liner list for each day. These are easier to remember without having to reference a calendar or to-do list or whatever, and allows for a lot more freedom with how I structure my day. For some days, it'll be a simple idea, and at the end of the day or start of the next day, I'll expand a bit on that in parentheses. With that, let's dive in to what I did!

Breaking Down The Themes

Wednesday - Initial Blog Post and Planning

Wednesday was basically the day I decided to try this out. I wrote about it, took some time think on it, and planned out the next couple weeks based on Daily Themes. Let me tell you, it's so much easier to just plan the days around ONE theme. It took a grand 15 minutes to flesh out the ideas of what I wanted to work on and restructure it so I'm not focusing too much on one thing or another. After completing that, I spent a little time working on an eshop project (which will soon be added to the tutorials section!)

Thursday - Guitar Practice (and some coding!)

So, daily themes have a bit of a side effect for me. I started to focus more on the tasks I struggle to focus on and procrastinated on the ONE task I wanted to complete for the day. This day happened to be guitar practice. I went full on believing I'd be able to just spend a day diving in to some music theory and fiddling with the ol' guitar. What really happened was: I applied to more jobs, networked, did some coding and contributed a bit of time to a couple startups. It wasn't until the evening that I finally sat down and picked up my guitar. Wild! But those couple hours I spent playing were absolutely joyful. I started working on some core concepts and relearning strumming patterns and such, and will be expanding on this by relearning some old songs shortly. Maybe as I figure out my setup more I can get some recordings posted!

Friday - Coding - Gatsby + Shopify

I knew I wanted to focus specifically on code here. I had mentally prepared for pushing through some CS50 at edX, as well as working on the estore project. One of the startups I'm contributing to had started discussing the idea of a headless Shopify with Gatsby. I absolutely enjoy working with Gatsby, it's high performance off the start and easy to use themes and addons. I have not spent any time with Shopify however, so I decided to dive in to building a template for them with Gatsby and Shopify. I spent my entire day working on this and had a ton of fun. We have a template we can base future projects off of now, and I picked up a little bit of experience with Shopify in the process.

Saturday - Reading/Studying (Git and Git Repo)

I recently recieved an article discussing how useful it can be to expand on your coding skills by simply diving in to repos and trudging through the code base to understand what's going on. I see how this can be useful, and have yet to spend a lot of time in the area, so I dove full on in to this. The article covered specifically the Git repo. We took time to go all the way back to the first commit for Git to understand what's going on in the background. It was quite insightful, and I fully recommend anyone who hasn't done so to take the time to check it out! Git has come a long way from where it was back in 2005. It's coded in C, so diving in to this went right in line with the classes for CS50 at edX, which was pretty fun for me!

Sunday - Relearning the Basics in Drawing

I used to be big on drawing and art in general. I had several classes throughout my school life in art growing up and I absolutely loved it. I've been years out of practice at this point, so I knew I wanted to revisit the basics. This comes down to lines and shapes for the most part. I added in some perspective drawing basics for fun and to challenge my memory and skills. They're quite far off from where they used to be! Granted, this route I'm drawing on my phone with Autodesk Sketchbook, so that probably contributes to the lack of accuracy. In time I will pick up a pack of A4 paper and some pens and pencils to get back to my roots! It was all good fun though.

Moving Forward

So far, I fully enjoy this setup. It's a bit silly, but it simplifies planning my own life out and what I want to achieve each day, so I will continue in this effort. As time goes I may get a bit more specific on the goals, particularly as I develop my skills in each area. I may keep the reviews to every 5 days or so for now to keep the write-ups small, and in time figure out a good way to chunk together multiple days and push these reviews back a bit more. For now, this keeps me in check and ensures I'm doing what I set out to do. Future posts will probably dive in to my shortcomings for each week a bit more. My biggest setback this first round: procrastinating the primary goal. It's good and bad. Good in the sense I really focused down on things I tend to slack off on, bad in that I really set back my entire goal for the day. I still did the thing! But not near as much time as I had hoped for was spent on it.

We'll continue on this journey. I'll have a couple other articles up later this week, and we'll see how things go moving forward!

Until next time!