It is the first monday of the final month of the year. It is also the final week of my college courses, and then I will be graduating. I can’t say anything very exciting happened over the course of this last month, considering most of what I have been focusing on is just my classwork. I pretty much halted all progress on any personal projects in order to manage my time for any class projects or tests. At this point, though, I only have one final test to take, and I will be completely finished. This means that I can finally begin working on my personal projects again. It has really been killing me not to get to work on these, as I have been aching to finish them for a while.

Personal Project Plans

Ecommerce Site

So my first plan is to finish my Ecommerce Site project. I will be sending this out as my “main” project to show off to employers, however I need to get started on some more projects that demonstrate other skills, such as using APIs, integrating databases, and testing. My ecommerce site is nice and all, but it does not feature any of those skills.

I also realize now that making these bigger, multi-month projects in order to learn smaller concepts is a bad idea. Seems obvious in hindsight, but that’s just how it is sometimes. I need to reserve my big-project-energy reserves for things I really want to polish and get out there. Kind of like how when you learn art or drawing, you don’t start off learning everything at once. You typically learn best by just doing shorter drawings, focusing on a very specific subject. The same idea applies to learning various tools and concepts in programming.

Personal Site

Next up is working on my personal site. This really needs to be worked on, as my current one is quite lackluster to say the least. I was going to rewrite it in SvelteKit, and maybe learn a styling tool such as Tailwind and/or SASS with it. I am keeping the design and functionality of my site limited for now, though, as I don’t want to spend too much time on it. I need to focus on getting other things done too. Once my personal site is done, though, I should have some templates for showcasing projects, and it will make it much easier for me to showcase my work.

SvelteKit may also seem like overkill considering I won’t be using a lot of the functionality at first, but I am choosing this because I may want to expand on it more later. It’s probably fine if I end up not using anything extra anyway, as I wanted to learn the basics of SvelteKit anyway.

Personal Blog (this site!)

I actually won’t be doing this one right away, but I do have plans to redo it. Right now I am just using a theme made by somebody else. I dug in and changed some styling from the defaults, but overall I have not changed much. What I really want is to create my own theme. I should also clarify, I have this site built with a static site generator called Hugo. A static site generator is used when you just need a way to manage content that doesn’t change much, such as a blog. Hugo is a bit more involved than something like WordPress, as you don’t have access to a WSYIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get). A WSYIWYG editor just has a user interface that makes it easier to edit your text, like howe Microsoft Word or Google Docs works.

Hugo, on the other hand, uses Markdown. Markdown requires you to know certain marks in order to markup your content. For instance, if I want to make a Heading, I need to put a # symbol in front of text.

It looks like this when I am editing:

# Heading 1

A paragraph of text.
_Italiced text._
**Bold text.**
**_Bold-Italic text._**

And it looks like this when the site is shown to you:

Heading 1

A paragraph of text. Italiced text. Bold text. Bold-Italic text.

That’s just a basic overview of how Hugo and Markdown works. I may go into a more in-depth overview at a later time. As for making my theme, though, that continues to get even more in-depth. To make my own theme I need to learn some of a language called Go, but this isn’t too different from WordPress in the sense that you need to know a language called PHP to make your own WordPress themes. I personally just don’t like WordPress very much, and Hugo is pretty quick to work with once you get everything setup.

Other Projects

I got a variety of other projects I want to work on. This seems to be a pattern, as I often talk about new projects I want to work on. I haven’t really been married to any ideas yet, though, so until I actually start the project (or a real plan), then it’s really up in the air. Right now, though, I plan on my next project being some kind of web app that uses an API from another site. I am thinking of doing a recipe app or something, but I will see once I sit down and actually get started.

Another idea was to remake my WordGuess 2023 game. It was my first publicly posted project, and it’s fine for that, but I really want to get into learning the Canvas using JavaScript. Canvas lets you make some more graphically focused things, which was a real challenge for me before, and is why I have no graphics on that site right now. At the time I thought that I needed to use a framework or library, but I recently realized that Canvas would be perfect to manage some visuals for the game. I also wanted to restyle the site anyway, as it seems to bland right now.

Non Web Dev Projects

It doesn’t end there for me, I want to do other things, too! For instance, I really want to get into game development, and learn Godot. I have been holding back on doing this for quite a while as I have been in class, but I soon will be unemployed and not be in class anymore, giving me all kinds of time to learn cool new stuff, at least until I can get a job.

Another interest has been in 3d Modeling and Animation. I got both a course from ToAnimate and a book about game animation over a year ago now, and I want to finally get into them so I can make a game with some properly animated characters. The modeling is going to be a challenge, since that is mostly just practice, but I will get plenty of that if I focus on making my own assets for the game.

Art and drawing is another hobby I want to develop, but I think I will just focus on just two or three things for now: web dev, game dev, and 3d modeling/animation. That is already hitting the limit for me, so adding more than that will be more than I can bargain for. Once I become more competent in one of those, then I may throw some drawing/art into the mix.

Fin

That’s about all I got for this month. Overall I just focused on my courses to get them done and move on, and from this point on I will be focusing on my personal projects and job searching. Wish me luck, everyone!