libretux

[libretux]

Learning about design.

Design is always something I’ve been able to appreciate and drool over, Its’ been a long term goal of mine to improve it in my work.

Nothing brings me greater pleasure than designing something that actually looks good! Now heres the issue, that hardly ever happens... (Has it ever happened? Dunno!) My designs almost never get the information needed over to the user in an intuitive way, this is something I want to change and its something I have vowed to practice more this year.

I want to know which font I should use for that header or paragraph, I want to learn how to create color pallets that blend together in harmony, I want data metabolizing on my web apps to look beautiful.

You cant expect to get good at something by not practicing it, so whenever an idea for an app or website comes into my head, Ive made myself think up a design that very moment and sketch it out on paper.

I also picked up a book to help improve my approach when it comes to design. “Design for hackers” is giving me a new set of eyes, Im 250 pages in and Im appreciating typography, hierarchy of information, proportions, color schemes and more. Already, Im starting to approach my designs in a different way and I can feel them improving as a result.

For once, design doesnt feel like some sort of black magic a privileged few have  just by pure luck. It feels like a language I can aspire to learn and eventually speak.

All this is making me think harder about the purpose of my sites and what designs would best fit the end user. This is an exciting change to go through.

Last year, in November a friend of mine who volunteers for a food bank asked me if I had the time to make them a website. My instinct to these sorts of requests (people have asked this question before for paid sites) is to turn them down because Im scared that I wont make a good enough end product.

I accepted and said that It’d be a while before I start due to a bereavement in the family, I needed time to get myself into a better place mentally before taking on more work. December comes and goes and I gladly embrace 2017 as it comes around.

Over the first 2 weeks I spent most my time sketching up designs for this website. I sketched one design.... Damn, it looks a lot like my portfolio, I told myself I wouldnt use it.

I sketched another, it worked (sort of) but felt too abstract considering the end users may be people who are technically illiterate and may feel intimidated by such a modern design.

I wanted something that had identity, something that expressed charity but something that the user wouldnt feel scared to navigate him/her-self round. I hit a wall at this point and decided to go with my first design and make changes on the fly to see what would work.

It didnt.

So, I started looking at some inspiration for charity websites and found a design I liked. While looking at it, I broke down what I liked about the site. The subtle colors, the typography, the padding and proportions of the site etc.

I thought carefully about these factors and toyed with a design idea. Sketching it out on paper, I really liked the look of it as it struck just the right balance for the kind of design I was looking for.

We have a design sketched out and ready to go... Just need to program it!

I spent an entire programming design and refining the hell out of it, from start to finish. By the end of the week I had a design that was almost completely perfected and ready for a CMS. I was gob smacked that it only took me a week to get to this stage, this is something that took me 2 or 3 weeks with my portfolio!

I open up my terminal spinning up a Wordpress Docker container (yay docker!) and begin work on converting my static design to a fully functional WordPress theme.

About a week and a half passes and Im done completely. I was done by the time a week had passed but I wanted a break seeing as I progressed way faster than I thought I would! So with a few final tweaks in place, that was it. I finally had a fully functional good looking WordPress theme.

The knowledge I had gained from that book I read guided me through the whole design from start to finish and gave me a really keen eye for detail throughout.

This is something Im really pleased I could achieve, this is something that I thought would always be completely out my reach. I’ve always been awful at design and thought Id never be able to rectify that. Turns out I was completely wrong! Im definitely no Matias Duarte and Im definitely not a good designer yet, but I feel like I’ve laid firm foundations for the first steps leading up to that goal.

Im looking at designs I feel are really attractive to me and I now recognize why a particular design catches my eye, be it a particular blend of color or maybe the way the proportions are laid out and even small things like color hierarchy and typography.

These visual queues are helping me learn what to use and when to use it and Im looking forward to designing more interfaces to put this knowledge in action and learn more... Its going to be a fun ride!

[libretux]

Imposter Syndrome

Looking at how far I’ve come recently and looking back at how I used to think that I wouldnt be able to learn certain things, Ive come to realise how much imposter syndrome limits me in my work.

That constant nagging thought... “You’re not good enough for this.”, “You will never get this”, “Most developers dont struggle with this.”, “Why do I find this so difficult?”

I remember I was plagued by all these thoughts a number of years ago. I couldnt grasp OOP to save my life and for some reason didnt think it would be physically possible for me to take full advantage of all the bare bones basics of programming.

This fear had held me back from taking on new projects. Every time I did a project before hand, before this point Id just think up something really complex and way beyond my skill level.

What happened with these projects? I obviously failed at each and every one of them. It wasn’t because I was bad at programming, I only had 1 and a half years experience in programming and I was trying to do the design, front end development, back end development along with learning all about the Linux command line.

I learnt something new with each project. I learnt my limitations, that brick wall I hit which stopped me from progressing with my project. Each wall I encountered just looked impossible to overcome, it looked like a terminal failure, something I simply couldnt over come.

So I’d shy away and think Id never move forward, but in between all this Id occasionally come up with and complete a couple small projects. One was an entire website. It was my very own CMS with a MyBB forum that had a custom developed theme and template.

Sure, the code sucked but you know what? It worked.

At the time I was missing something crucial with that. All I could see was that my work completely sucked and that it was because I was a failure at programming. It wasnt. It was because this was my first ever web site developed from scratch properly intended for public use.

It filled its purpose and people used it, how great is that!?

Then, history repeat itself once again when I did the same thing but this time much more refined and with several revisions which lead to major improvements further on.

This is something I didnt even notice. I didnt take it on as an achievement at all.

What I did with my second website was: Learn from my previous mistakes. Improve on my technique from my previous project and most importantly I continued to maintain and improve it over the coming years to make a lasting forum used by around 350 people. (thats not as impressive as it sounds, we only had a few core members that were active, but thats not the point!)

Improvements! At the time I was also trying to learn all about the world of mobile app development as well as my web development stuff. My mentor who introduced me to programming assured me that there was nothing wrong with my pace and that I was doing very very well.

This man knows his stuff, trust me. I took his words on but couldnt quite use them to try and help myself see that I was moving forward. My family, friends and acquaintances said I was doing extremely well and I was destined to do well.

The thing was, I was really caught up in the lack of quality in my work. It wasnt that I didnt want to work hard at getting good, its just that at the time I really really really wanted to make things. I yearned for it and it was something I desperately wanted to do, I just didnt quite know how to go about doing it.

It was around this time that I began talking to other developers and watching them make amazing things. I looked back on my own work in horror.

Why cant I program that well? Why can he do it when hes been programming for the same amount of time as me? Im not a real programmer.

I was trying to do so many things and spreading myself thin that I never really had too much solid direction. I never stood in one spot to improve on a particular subject. This wasnt intentional, this was because I was excited to learn all these exciting new technologies at my disposal!

It got to a point where I got back to basics. I went on Codecademy and took the Javascript course to make sure I had my core programming knowledge down.

Everything was more or less fine, I did learn a few cool things along the way but nothing particularly special. However, by the end of it I did have better comprehension so there was that.

At one point on the course, I hit OOP. This really scared me, this was something I was convinced I would never ever understand simply because. I took this part of the course on calmly and just broke it down as much as possible without expecting to understand OOP by the end, jut to take the pressure off.

Half way through, I could make objects in Javascript and I started to understand its purpose under other projects I had previously seen this mysterious code under.

I still couldnt understand in what scenario you would use this abstract concept in, and if Im honest I still dont fully grasp its potential although I have a reasonable idea.

By the end of it all, a few ideas came into my head.... OOP could be used for a database abstraction layer! Yup, correct! This comforted me, I felt like I was finally moving forward and it gave me a confidence boost.

It was at this time when I began working with AngularJS based on a recommendation of a friend at the time. This was extremely exciting for me, all the potential was overwhelmingly cool!

I kept my cool and started basic. I made a portfolio! It was this weird badly programmed CMS with a PHP backend and an Angular JS frontend to hook into it.

It was ugly, but it worked!

Similar pattern follows to my previous work. This time I had used git to keep track of my portfolio. I got really addicted to pushing commits which motivated me to continue improving it. I learnt a lot along the way with that project!

A few months down the line Im making a real time chat application with a PHP backend and an AngularJS front end. It felt a privilege to feel challenged but not overly scared.

In 3 weeks, it was fully working and I had made a tonne of improvements and commits to help progress the web app. I was finally starting to see progress and that I could potentially do a good job!

A few months pass by and I have a business idea. I begin working on it as a fully fledged web app from the very start. Again, this (more or less, excluding my previous project) was my very first serious web app.

It started out with a simple login screen and dashboard interface for members. The code was ugly but it worked. A few commits later, improvements were made. I implemented a very broken code design of my own, but it worked.

Fast forward a year and half down the line and here we are today. Im still working on this project and with every commit, the project has gradually rewritten itself into an agile code base. Its by no means perfect and Im still learning.

But it works! The difference is this time, it actually works well and the code is becoming more and more maintainable by the day as I learn from my previous mistakes. Im removing bad bits of code from my previous mistakes one by one and replacing it with improved, more agile code.

Its really starting to take shape now and im extremely excited to see where this will take me. In this time, I started with MySQL, I switched to PostgreSQL to take advantage of triggers for real time notifications. This forced me to improve my database knowledge and I can now write MySQL statements completely independently without the use of a GUI tool such as PHPMyAdmin.

Im not good at writing MySQL queries, but they work! You guessed it, theyre improving every day as I learn more and more about database design. Hell, Ive been programming a product which makes extensive use of MySQLite and MySQL... The queries have to be agnostic and work under MySQL and MySQLite. (this is not my design choice, its something that has to tap in to a parent product)

Again, this has forced me to think hard about how I program my queries and its forced me to improve my knowledge.

This project has also forced me to focus on user interface design issues. This was as recent as 3 months ago when I started the project, I felt fearful all over again. Il never be able to make a nice user interface, I cant be like these amazing programmers which can make beautiful RESTful APIs with excellent frontends and beautiful designs on top.

I stopped myself and started looking at other peoples similar projects and realised none of them looked very nice at all. Suddenly, I realized I had ideas in my head which looked better than their produce. I began working on a design language and started developing my product and 3 months  down the line I have a very nice and complete looking product with a lot of UX and UI details taken into account which I look forward to showing people when I have time to add a few finishing touches.

Hopefully, said project will end up making me some money as its something I plan on selling. This will teach me all new things and has proven to me I can take on challenges.

Writing out this blog post is surprising me, I didn’t realize just how many challenges I encounter (or any other learning developer for that matter!), I really dont give my self enough time and patience.

I have new challenges on the horizon. I need to complete this massive project Ive been working on for 2 years and start it as my business. Im learning new ways of working with tools such as Docker to speed up my work and make it more reliable, Im trying to improve my math skills through Khan Academy and most scarily of all: Im also learning Android development.

Again, Android development is something that has always deeply intimidated me. I’ve made 1 app, it sucked, it worked yada yada yada. But I was never good enough to justify working on that as my core skill when I had more web development experience behind me.

Now I have far better foundations backing me up, Android development is my new scary challenge. Something that will push me forward and lead me into an exciting new area which I have yet to explore but bursting with ideas for.

Its something which Im catching myself shying away from but am making a very active effort every week to learn one new thing with Android development. (Which is made pretty easy thanks to a decent course Im following on Udemy)

Its been cool doing Android development,  coming to Java relatively clueless, I was comforted at how quickly I picked up the language and its ways. I understand classes, data types and memory management already and am very excited to continue developing applications once I’ve mastered Fragments...

Something thats admittedly flawing me. I’ve attempted 2 sample projects to get Fragments working and both have failed but thats OK.I understand the core concepts and Im going to try again and again, each time getting a more intimate understanding of exactly why I should do something that way (and even come up with a better/shorter way of doing something) until eventually, it clicks! I understand it and it works, at which point I will keep repeating the same projects until I can remember how its done and then move on to my next adventure in Android development.

Just now, I’ve figured out how to make a Docker service with docker-compose which can setup the stack I need for that product Im working on for my business. Next thing is to make sure the code can deploy itself into the container on setup.

Heres to progress!

[libretux]

Boating

As I mentioned in my first blog post, I grew up around canals and canal boats. Its always been something my family has done, my grandparents had narrow boats throughout their lives until latterly.

Mom and dad used to have one too before I was born, but they decided that canals and babies/toddlers dont mix! (they were right...)

Around 2006, we finally got back into boating again. I remember the first time getting on the boat, it felt so weird looking out the window and seeing the water so close. It was a real mess inside when we got it, very dilapidated and in need of dire restoration inside.

My grandfather is a DIY god, so it was never a problem for him to help us do her up and get this boat back to its former glory. So, after a couple weeks we have the interior comfortable and things were finally starting to get cosy. We had the log fire going and the transformer running off the engine so we could have a 12 volt TV running for rainy days, it was perfect!

At the time, I remember having saved for ages and my birthday finally came along, at which point I had my very first Playstation Portable, which was absolutely perfect for the boat when we weren’t out and about. I have fond memories of playing Locoroco into the silent country nights and staying as warm as possible under the sheets if the fire went out!

Winters were fun on board the boat, I remember having the fire going keeping us all warm. Something about it was just so therapeutic, especially if the lights were down and the window on it was clean enough to see it all.

Sometimes, we’d even use the fire to cook up curries and we’d all sit in the front together where we had fold down tables between the sandwich of bench seats either side.

My brother used to be an avid fisher, so the boat was perfect for him. More often than not, he’d be at the bow of the boat with the canopy open at night for fishing. It was really cool watching him catch the odd carp and weighing it up to see if it beat his personal record of 14lbs! (I think)

Now days, we no longer have a boat as our needs changed 5 years ago, my grandfather was getting older and unable to get into tight spaces to help fix the engine whenever it failed and among other things; none of us were really old enough to contribute at the time.

Boats are a maintenance nightmare, they need constant care and attention to make sure they dont end up in a mess.

Im finding my self missing the canals as of late and would like to get back on them at some point. Its not looking like Il have the funds for a long time to buy a boat outright, so Im thinking Il probably purchase myself a canoe, that way I can cycle up to my local canals and start canoeing to get my canal fix!

Not quite the same but its something!

I think the thing I like about canals is that you can feel the pace of life slow down, theres no big rush and its perfect for introverts. I think this is what I miss so much about it. Plus theyre local and easy to get to from where I am, so its a quick and easy escape if you wanna wind down a bit.

[libretux]

Home server nightmare

Before my holiday, my servers OS hard drive decided to kick the bucket, which was pretty scary stuff with how everything was configured just to my liking. I was browsing Reddit one evening while listening to my music and all of a sudden Rhythmbox couldnt find my daapd server, thinking it was just the ethernet chord being loose, I went downstairs to realize that the ethernet chord was perfectly fine.

I plug my screen into the server to see whats up and Im greeted was greeted by horrifying read write errors and errors  that my drive was dying a slow and painful death. So I switched the server off and pulled the drive out of it and went plugged it into my main rig to salvage my work off it.

It mounts!! So obviously, I go straight to my work and copy it off, while also exporting my Postgres databases. At this point its copied onto my rig, so I also decide to put it on my laptop and one of my offsite servers just to make sure.

At this point Im a bit lost, so I decide to start looking for another drive that I might have hidden away. I found my very first hard drive which was in the gaming PC i built back in 2009, 250gb... That’d do.

Nothing was on it other than an outdated installation of Ubuntu 12.04, so I just formatted and installed Jessie as usual but this time with the firmware iso rather than the standalone netinst iso.

Awesome! Everything works out the box, nice surprise compared to last time. At this point, I start thinking up a strategy to make situations like this less disastrous in future, after all you live and learn!

Docker is something I’ve been meaning to look into for about 2 years now but have never manned up enough to properly get stuck in. So I added the needed repos and installed it. I began my Docker journey by installing an Ubuntu Core image and just messing around a bit. That worked well, so now to actually take advantage of what Docker has to offer!

The first thing I do is install the daapd container, I need my tunes! I was really surprised at how effortless it all was, I just passed in a few params to the command and it was all ready to go; already showing up in Rhythmbox!

This felt pretty empowering. All Id need to do to get my music setup working again if ever my server failed was enter one simple command and that was it. Cool!

So the next thing I need is my 200GB worth of TV shows and movies, so I install the Plex container and mount my storage drive to it, much like I did with the daapd container. Awesome. Everything works and it loads up perfectly... Or at least, so I thought.

I logged into the web interface for Plex to find that none of the movie posters were showing, which made browsing for films on my Roku a bit of a pain. So I start delving into the logs and find that theres a collection of errors for the posters plugin saying something about symlinks not working.

Eventually I realized this was because the storage drive I was using (for some reason) was formatted using FAT32, meaning no symlink support. So I then start looking for solutions and trying to remember how I got it working beforehand. There was this weird hack I found that I think I used before so I tried it again and it didnt work.

I gave up at this point and just decided to leave til after the holiday. So the holiday comes and goes, I get back and everythings online again. I decide to watch a film, so I launch Plex to notice that all my film posters were there! Awesome.

I click play on I Am Legend and notice that its taking forever to load, only to be met with an error saying that Plex couldnt access the requested file. So I connect to the Samba share to see whats up and all the files appear to be there, being in the root directory of the storage drive I decide to browse around just to check everythings OK.

I get access denied errors. I gathered it was something to do with my fstab mount, so I take a look at that and everything checks out OK, weird. At this point I decided to unmount it and take the hard drive out in a mild panic and try hooking it up to my desktop.

I boot into Linux to find that the drive isnt showing at all, which was a bit scary to say the least. I reboot into Windows... Anyone who has used Windows for a long time without reinstalling it will know how slow it is to boot if you havent done a fresh install for nearly 3 years. So I wait about 10 minutes for it to stop launching all its startup items (which takes a mere 2 minutes on Debian) and then I see its searching for drivers. This takes a good 5 minutes but by the end of it its installed and ready to go.

I cant see the drive in My Computer so I go to the partition manager and assign a letter to the drive and it appears!

Everything works and I can see all my files. I decide to start copying them off while I have the chance but Im met with Windows offering to repair the drive for me, so I agree to kill 2 birds with one stone, id be able to mount it in Linux after this.

This is something I could have done in Linux but I didnt know how and it was 3am at this point, so I just wanted the fastest way possible.

I have a sudden change of heart when I find out that (obviously) I couldnt continue copying files off while repairing the drive so I canceled it. A cruel twist of fate leaves me being unable to access my files! Same access errors as before at this point... I try everything under the sun and get really concerned.

I disconnect the drive and set out to find my USB HDD dock and try it in that. I boot back into Linux... It mounts! Now I copy all the most important files off while thinking about how stupid I am for not having a backup drive.

With the money I got mugged of for No Mans Sky, I could have bought a 1tb backup drive... I feel robbed.

Oh well, the most important stuff is off it now and Im left wondering what to do next with the data I cant fit on my desktops HDD.

[libretux]

A month with Linux

In a couple days time, Linux will have been my primary desktop OS for the first time in 5 years. I’ve been using it for everything such as: programming, gaming, leisure and have even tried a bit of video editing along the way!

Here I am a month down the line and Im actually liking it that much that Im feeling about Windows how I used to feel about my old Linux setup: Oh, its not polished enough to feel comfortable, Il just boot quickly into Windows, itl be quicker. I dont know if I can be bothered to reboot into Linux to only reboot into Windows later for gaming. Id miss window snapping too much.

Now whenever I use windows, Im trying to get out of it as quickly as possible so I can be on Linux again. Linux is now where I feel most at home OS wise, which is something that has been pretty hard to achieve over the years with one thing and another.

Like explained in my last post, I think what makes the transition easier is that I’ve switched from Openbox to Gnome. Theres so many little things with the UI/UX that you dont realize you miss on a lightweight WM that makes Windows ever more appealing, especially when you’re not working anymore.

Now I have configured Gnome just how I like it, its tailor made to suit me in any scenario, which makes a very good experience. It feels so good to be using an OS I know respects my privacy and I know I have full control over with no worries. All I have to worry about are the applications I install, and that is completely my responsibility.

It feels so freeing to know that this is my software on my computer.

[libretux]

Settling into Linux, hopefully once and for all.

Last weekend, there was a window of opportunity to get Linux working on my main desktop again. Its something Ive been meaning to do for 6 months now, so I thought Id better get it done while the mood struck me.

I do the usual. Get my phone out, download the latest Debian Jessie ISO and use DriveDroid to save me from formatting a USB stick. I boot into Debian and apart from the networking firmware issue at the start, the install went fairly well.

Up until now, I’ve been an avid user of Openbox since 2013 since the late Crunchbang turned me on to it. I liked Openbox because it felt I was squeezing every last drop of resources available to me, that in itself was a pretty satisfying experience.

Booting to the desktop and finding out it only uses 100mb is pretty cool stuff. Plus, I loved how quick it was to work with. To me, it felt like a happy medium between a tiling WM and a fully fledged DE.

But its recently occurred to me, as much as I love Openbox; its probably not best for using Linux full time for me. This started to show when I only used it for work and would reboot back into Windows straight after, which is bad because I usually ended up just staying in Windows to work just to save on rebooting.

With all this Windows 10 hoopla, seeing it come closer and closer to me, powerless to stop it I felt kind of trapped but then thought back to my brief stint with Ubuntu. When I had Ubuntu installed with all its bells and whistles, Wine and all; I was very settled and Windows often became an afterthought for months at a time.

I thought a bit about why this was and realized what I had lost when I switched to Openbox: convenience. Things just work with DEs such as Gnome or KDE. Plus, the extra polish to the UX is much appreciated which is something that kept drawing me back to Windows 7 time and time again. (”extra polish” meaning aero)

I get to the point in the Debian installer where it asks you what packages you want installed... I take a look and see Gnome. I had checked out Gnome in Virtualbox a few days back and wanted to see what it had to offer, so I went for it.

I knew that Gnome would potentially provide me with what I needed to keep me on Linux without missing Windows. So the install finished up and I rebooted to my new desktop.

I feel way out of my depth, having literally never ever worked with Gnome up until a few days ago when I had a little play with it in a VM. I start looking around at some of its features and feel pleasantly surprised how well everything integrates, the weather widget, the music control widget I downloaded from Gnome extensions along with a few other things.

At this point, Im starting to warm to how it functions at least, but definitely didnt like how it looked. I hated the dated look, I wanted something a bit more modern and minimalistic. I remembered a post I saw the other week on /r/unixporn so I decided to take leaf out of this guys book and download the Dash to Dock extension he was using along with some dark material theme I liked.

Now thnigs are looking pretty damn nice, so much so that even Firefox looks pretty beautiful on its own without its own theme. At this stage I was pretty happy, especially after I found a really slick icon pack to compliment my choice of theme.

I install a couple packages I need and get to the make or break bit: installing my GPU drivers *and* Steam.

Sounds pretty trivial but this usually isnt the case for me.

I downloaded the driver from Nvidias website and ran the .run file. Went through the install as always and was hit with an error about trying to install 32 bit libs and that it wouldnt work for some reason or other. This is where I spend the next 3 hours trying to figure out why 32 bit libraries wherent working... In the end I installed the drivers found in Jessies repos and uninstalled them then installed the ones I downloaded.

That did the trick! I dont know why, but it worked.

This is where the comfort comes in, Steam is installed and working fine. Im now finding myself obsessing over all the available Gnome extensions available to me. Im loving how workspaces work, its awesome being able to play my games on Linux with Steam natively, Im just loving the whole experience.

Rhythmbox playing my music with a gnome extension for integration with that, its all so so good!

Safe to say that Im pretty happy where I am right now, this feels nice. Is there much I miss from Windows? I honestly cant think of anything I miss at all, the biggest thing I miss is the games I can no longer play. This isnt worrying me as much though because 2 games I cant play right now are on their way to Linux soon, even if these didnt find their way on Linux Id be able to run them perfectly in Wine anyway.

Theres just 1 game that I miss which is GTA V which probably isnt too tragic seeing as I only ever play it if my friends want to. Im considering getting back into GTA IV in Wine with a multilayer mod to itch that GTA scratch.

All in all, Im liking this so far and I dont see myself going back on Windows for a long peroid of time any time soon.

[libretux]

Figuring out life

I’ve recently been thinking about my future, about plans for what I want to do and where I want to be.

Being an introvert (INFP!), I don't mind my own company and like living a pretty quiet life. I guess this is where the appeal of living in the country comes in for me, but being only 19 this is quite a way off for me yet.

Having said that, I've been taking a look at what I could do to have a country lifestyle and still be close to my family (who are very important to me) and friends.

Having a log cabin has always been appealing to me, so has a tiny house but those 2 options don't allow for the UKs planning permissions, sadly. That basically leaves me with one option, which is buying a house or renting someplace out in the country, which would still be too expensive for me.

I really don't want much out of life, all I want to do is have enough money for a roof over my head, a dog (or two!),  maybe the odd gadget here and there and the time to pop up to volunteer at my local dog shelter which I enjoy a lot.

Thinking it over again and again, I thought back to the days where my family used to own a narrow boat. I could definitely live on board one but never actually thought about it properly before.

I didn't realize people were able to fit a proper bath and toilet inside their layouts, which has definitely made the idea far more appealing to me. There's also the issue of electric and moorings which were probably some of the bigger things that put me off as well. But then I remembered that I know of a place I can moor which has an electric hookup, which coupled with some solar panels on the roof would make things much more achievable.

Right now, I'm unable to work (for good reason) and learn at the same time, so I'm pretty much dedicating all my resources and time (same goes for the past 5 years) where I can to learning as much as possible about my craft:

Programming.

I absolutely love programming and its always something I have immensely enjoyed. Right now, I'm working on a web app (its been an ongoing project for around a year and a half now!) which will hopefully turn into a future business venture but I'm also working on other things to earn money such as Wordpress sites and Android apps.

Not that I'm actually learning that stuff so I can make oodles of cash, they just happen to be areas of programming that really excite and inspire me to learn more. I already have a few people that are waiting for me to get good at what I do so I can do websites for them, which gives me high hopes for my plans.

This web app I'm working on isn't my only business venture I have planned either, I also have a concept of an Android app in the works which Id like to have a shot at (while learning about Googles FireBase). I think sticking ads on it would bring in some nice ad revenue at the very least.

Right now, as well as doing at least half an hour of development every single day (although on a weekday I typically do 4 hours +), on days where I'm not well enough to develop I do half an hour of whichever I feel happy doing. (web or android dev) This makes sure that when I'm out of action for longer periods of time, there's a trickle of progress for me to keep track of.

Another thing I'm trying to do is at least 30 minutes of Android development every day, which seems to work very well so far and will hopefully accelerate my Android SDK skills.

The more I learn about Android development, the more excited I get about the platform, especially knowing I can make an awesome API for any app idea I might have with my PHP knowledge.

I'm aware that I have a long way to go on my journey but I finally feel progress. I feel like I'm understanding things for once, I can be taught something and do it independently more or less right away without any help. I can read over documentation and begin to understand the inner workings of whatever I'm working with, this is something I feel extremely privileged to have, especially after struggling with this for years in the past.

Having said this, I think it will probably take me til at least May next year before I get even slightly good or maybe good at it. But, I'm going to be breaking it up into small pieces alongside my other work so I can just use it to have fun and explore.

Inbetween all this I’l start looking into what I can do to produce more Youtube videos, I think its something Id be quite good at with a bit of practise. I have a number of Youtube videos on my channel right now which have more then 1k views, which is a pretty good start for such a low subscriber count.

I thought it’d be a good idea to start vlogging alongside any fun projects I do, like what Im doing with my O2 Joggler now. Currently recording a video for that so we’l see how it goes and what the final result of the video is, I also have video footage of me prepping my p50 when it arrived earlier in the year.

Lots of stuff going on, hopefully I can keep up and follow through with it all!