My professional roadmap

After finishing last week’s blog entry, in which I ranted about a professor’s method of teaching separation of concerns, I realized that I had promised a discussion of my roadmap but had not delivered. So, this week, I made it a priority to make sure I get that done.

When I was still in school, I knew there was a long list of things that I really wanted to try out in the web development sphere: frameworks, tools, tutorials. I have kept a list, and the tutorials alone amount to more than three hundred hours of runtime. Needless to say, I needed to start prioritizing. But I didn’t prioritize well in the beginning. Instead, I started grabbing shiny things and running around, sampling everything I could get my hands on, and this began causing problems.

Let’s back up to graduation for a moment. To begin with, I do not regret starting with Flask, at all. I love the Flask framework. I understand the Flask framework. I am competent with the Flask framework, and I am so glad that was my first choice to begin independent learning. But then I stumbled a little bit. The problem stemmed from my inexperience with hosting providers. I had difficulty choosing a hosting provider for my Flask websites. I didn’t want to hack a shared hosting site to try to get one up and I knew that if I was going to be successful freelancing, I would need a place to host multiple sites without shattering a budget. So instead of exploring options for hosting Flask, I decided I was going to dive into SvelteKit. At this point I had two clients who wanted me to build them a website and I decided I was going to learn Svelte and build both of those websites on SvelteKit. Thanks to the Lord above that I came to my senses quickly. It wasn’t that Svelte is hard or that I didn’t know how to build a website in Svelte; it’s that I’m just learning it and I really don’t UNDERSTAND Svelte. Too much of what was happening was just like magic. You did this, and ta da, this happened. But how? Magic. And if you read my story from last week, you know that, yes, I was having some problems. I was solving each in turn, but it was still a learning curve, and these business owners expected a professional-quality website that met their needs. It wasn’t time for amateur hour and considering I had just graduated a couple of months prior, I already had enough going against me.

There were some days filled with anxiety and imposter syndrome. I finally had to stop and think about what was going on. Then I decided to try to use SvelteKit’s static site generator to create a website that could be hosted on shared hosting, thinking I might be able to take advantage of some really cheap deals. That was a disaster. Error message after error message was fed to me. Every time I solved one error, I was met with another. The details would turn this entry into a book about static sites and SvelteKit, so we’ll avoid that and move on, but just know it was soul crushing. At the time, I was running it locally, and I’ve since learned that some of the problems were due to how the created files run locally versus on a server.

I think the end result was positive. It made me really sit down and evaluate. Internally, I came to a conclusion that led me to tell myself, 'Dude, it’s time to grow up. If you want to use shared hosting, you better start looking at WordPress. It. Is. Time. To. Grow. Up.

First, I decided to start looking at various hosting options. Forget the static site generator—let’s find a professional place to put my websites that is still affordable. I decided to check out Vercel first…have I said “Thank the Lord above” yet? Oh yeah. When I discovered how easy Vercel was to use with its “serverless” approach bringing your code directly from GitHub, it became a facepalm moment for not trying it sooner.

With some reliable tools, I decided it was time to get a grip and make a plan. I needed to stop thrashing around and randomly stumbling upon solutions. I needed a roadmap. So, I sat down and made a roadmap. I fully intended to put the roadmap in this post, but then I realized if I was going to take it seriously, I needed a document—something that set goals and timelines. I’ve saved it as a PDF and put a link to the document in my “About” section on the home page of this website. You may have already seen it.

In the short term I’m going to go back to Flask for my freelance websites and I’m going to host on Vercel. I am going to build in what I know and understand. I’ve set goals for gaining a deep understanding of JavaScript and moving into JavaScript frameworks. I’ve listed React and Vue as the frameworks, as those are the ones that are more popular, but I might still do more with Svelte first. But JavaScript first and I’ve already started that journey. You should see some new JavaScript projects added to the portfolio before too long, so all I can say is, “Here we go.”

Posted on: 2024-08-26 04:16:14.049882