What all happened today?
did exercise in the morning using the Day 2 schedule of Julian's Build Muscle workout plan. I didn't rush through it, took the time to do all the exercises. It was fun and calm.
talked to a former colleague and mentor, they shared his experience of how they went about a few career changes and a break. When they were talking, I felt they were talking in my mind.
brewed coffee in the beautiful cup I got as a gift from my team. It was special.
few of my teammates pinged me on text or LinkedIn to say hello - it feels weird to see my office room empty.
the reactions and comments to the Linked Post on the new beginning was definitely overwhelming. So many people (old colleagues, friends) reached out to encourage me and say that they are also thinking of going back to coding. I never expected this much of activity.
published the blog about the new beginning - slightly modified version of the LinkedIn post. While doing that, I also updated the instructions of how to publish a new blog post in Hugo.
met an Intuit colleague (a manager who was in Philips also earlier with me) to discuss my plan to pivot my career. They also wanted to do something similar to be more hands-on, so they wanted to understand and get feedback. We met at a Starbucks next to my home and it was a good conversation. We talked about a few ideas on how to get started.
started learning JavaScript - a few stumbling blocks. I wanted to do Execute Program's course Modern JavaScript, because it teaches you in a very interactive way and uses the active recall method. It was not available when I tried, so I started a Udemy course, but that was not great. After some time, I was able to access Execute Program's course and I started doing that. By then it was night, so I will do some more and wrap up.
started a GitHub repo to store the learnings, code samples from learning JavaScript https://github.com/annjose/learn-javascript. Also started an Obsidian page to save the notes.
TIL (Today I learned) that...
Hashnode allows the content to be backed-up to a GitHub repo - see this article for details. You can access it from the Dashboard page as well. I thought this is pretty cool because it adheres to the principle of 'you own your data'
Creating a Week Blueprint is a useful practice to divide up your time to what is most important first every day. It is the "ideal day", for example, deep work during the time that you are most productive, meetings when you are in that mode etc. I made a weekly blueprint for myself. Will try it out tomorrow.
Some of the pedestrian crosswalks in my neighborhood have a "Wave" option - so if you want to cross a road, you don't need to press the black arrow button. You can just wave in front of it and the familiar voice will say'Wait" as usual. That was pretty cool. Here is a picture of one such sidewalk.
Tomorrow's plan
start the day with ExecuteProgram JavaScript course before 8am. I want to spend most of my time tomorrow on that.
It is a rest day for strength training, all I need to do is reach 8K steps by evening