2019 Plans

For 2019 I’m hoping to learn a couple of new things as well as continue posting here and continue practicing drawing and painting and trying to be creative. My plans may be a lot to chew on since everything takes so much time and things never come out as I hoped. I have 3, maybe 4, major things to learn and finding time is a major hurdle. I just don’t know how others do it. I guess they ignore current affairs.

HTML/CSS and maybe Javascript

My personal project is to understand better how HTML and CSS drives web pages, so I have bought a book to go follow and use as an example. I figured that with the new Gutenberg editor, this would be a good time to go beyond learning how to use and manage WordPress and dig into the nuts and bolts of the development of web sites – to some extent. I now have a better understanding of what it takes to do a website. While setting up a website through WordPress is fairly simple – and doing two or three websites would solidify what you would need to do to set it up, maintaining the website is the greater challenge. I only post twice a week and it can still be difficult to maintain a schedule. It takes time to come up with an idea of what to write and I usually do a lot of reading to give me ideas. Then there is the thinking of the approach of the topic and writing out my perspective. Finally, there is the development of the accompanying images to go with my site. I could just use Unsplash or Pixabay but I wanted to use my site as an excuse to do some drawing and painting. Also, it is a good way to make me site a bit different than others out there.

So, this year is to learn HTML, CSS and possibly javascript.

Quickbase

Next, for work, I had some discussions with the new head of our department on how we can change some things and those changes will require learning Quickbase. I don’t want to dwell too much on this topic because I do want to see if the plans really happens. Sometimes you get started on some plans but then something comes up and your plans peter out, so I want to see if these plans really hold. So far it does seem like there is a real interest.

Tableau

The other part for work, which again, I don’t want to go into too much detail for the same reasons, but it looks like I may have to learn Tableau, which was one of the things I wanted to learn. About a year or so ago, I even seriously debated on shelling out $1000 annual fee just to learn the software, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to devote the time to learning and using it. I was already busy doing other stuff and felt like it could be money down the drain, in other words, the software would just sit on my machine unused. But now, it looks like I could be developing some stuff using Tableau. So I’m gonna grab the chance when I can.