As part of my personal development activities I separate the year into six ‘sprints’ during which I focus my development activity on a small number of identified goals. This post reviews my development activity during September and October 2014.

Plans for the period

  • Learn AngularJS and create a single-page app
  • Try blogging and screen casting
  • Start attending meetups

Activity

During the sprint I completed over 60 hours independent study, averaging just over 1 hour each day. In real terms, around 60% of this time was at weekends with the remainder being done in the weekday evenings.

Specific activities completed were:

  • Completing Pro AngularJS by Martin Freeman, a comprehensive text on AngularJS (in retrospect, this was perhaps a little too comprehensive for a first text)
  • Completing the AngularJS Fundamentals course from Pluralsight (test score 100%)
  • Completing the Testing AngularJS From Scratch course from Pluralsight (test score 100%)
  • Watching the Pluralsight Play by Play: Learning AngularJS
  • Completing the AngularJS Patterns: Clean Code course from Pluralsight (test score 87.5%)
  • Attending my first London Web meetup on ‘Get Gulping with JavaScript task runners’
  • Reading The Dip by Seth Godin

Outcomes

I feel this sprint has been a success, and the learning activity has been worthwhile. At the end of this sprint I:

  • feel I have a pretty good handle on AngularJS. I have added it to my CV and started using it in production. I have also recreated my personal website as an entirely single-page app
  • intend to attend more relevant meetups (but only where they’re truly relevant to my interests and development plans)
  • have gained an appreciation for pushing through difficult learning because it provides greatest value (that was really the only valuable lesson for me from The Dip)

Plans for next sprint

During November, December and January I will be focussing on non-technical personal development. I will be working on my personal website during this period to but I won’t be reviewing the sprint here (it’s personal stuff to not that anyone reads this). I’ll be kicking off the next sprint on 26 January.