Good morning everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post. To keep you all informed, I’d like to make a quick post about where I’ve been and what the plans are for this year.
Where Did eriksCodeSpace Go?
The year 2020 was a crazy one for me (and for the rest of the world). Besides living through the same events you all lived through, I also got married, presented at my first conference, defended my thesis, and finished my master’s degree. This did not leave a lot of time for blogging as you can probably tell from my sparse posts during 2020.
In addition, when I finally did have time to blog, this site was throwing an error. I stubbornly tried to fix it myself without looking anything up and failed at fixing the problem for weeks. When I finally did look up the documentation for the problem (literally provided by my hosting service), I was able to fix the problem in about 4 minutes.
Yes, I should know better and yes this is embarrassing to admit.
Where is eriksCodeSpace Going?
I’m thrilled to announce that I have signed a book deal with No Starch Press (publishers of Al Sweigart’s legendary Automate the Boring Stuff with Python). I will be writing a book aiming to give new developers all the tools and skills they need to bridge the gap between “newbie” and “competent.” The main, unstated goal of the book is to help developers accelerate process of becoming effective in their first role as a junior developer.
Since most of my time will be dedicated to writing the book, it’s probably going to be another year of sparse blog posts, but my goal is to write at least 2 new series for the site.
That being said, I’d also like to note that I’m going to favor “article series” over single blog posts, this isn’t the most popular way to write but I believe it’s the best format for deliver what is needed to my intended audience. I will try to keep articles series no longer than 4 parts while probably averaging 3.
The 2021 Article Series
The first series is going to be a professional level Git series. I have written many comments on message boards and handed out a bunch of advice that “new programmers must know version control!” I firmly believe that both bootcamps and computer science programs fail at teaching this.
I’m thinking this will be a 3 part series starting with basic concepts and everyday uses, moving on to more advanced commands, and finishing with an introduction to GitHub actions and Continuous Integration (CI).
I haven’t decided about the second series though, and I’m definitely up for suggestions. I am thinking of either doing something around the area of refactoring or performance testing. I know these are two very different things, but I just can’t decide what I think is more important to budding developers. Stay tuned to find out!