On The Desire To Change Career
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On The Desire To Change Career

Byrichard

If I had been smart I would have changed career path around 2006-2007 when I was in London surrounded by entrepreneurs and web developers, rather than now during a pandemic. Normally I struggle to find new contracts because of two things. The first is that for camera and editing work there are very few opportunities per year, and the opportunities that do arise have hundreds, if not thousands of candidates so the probability of success is low. The other issue is that because there are few jobs, if you fail you may have to wait months for an opportunity to appear.


That’s why I have spent the entirety of the pandemic reskilling. Every single day I study web development. I have gone from IT support courses, to CSS to HTML, to Javascript to frameworks and back to JavaScript. The journey is long and hard. When I was finally free to study Angular in depth I found that my knowledge of Javascript was not deep enough, so I went back and studied on JS pathway, and now I am studying a second one on Linkedin Learning. My goal is to be proficient. This isn’t a one day goal. This is a journey.


You can follow my journey on github to see what I am learning. One of my side projects, to practice what I have learned is this one. At the moment it is a simple app that retrieves a random image from my instagram gallery and displays it with its title. This self-project is worthwhile because it is easy to follow a course and code along with the teacher. The problem with this is that when there is no teacher, and no model you need to innovate and find your own solutions.


Last year when I tried something similar I found a way to convert from Json to CSV to bring it into Wordpress. Now I am working with Fetch, random number generators to find a post, let to be within the scope of one block, converting epoch time to human readable date and time, and more. If I followed instructions I would find it easy to do, but I couldn’t find any, so I am experimenting with ideas from courses. The next step is to find how to use classes and ids’ to embellish it with CSS.


I started with the random post generator. The next steps will be to use constructors, for each loops, display ten posts at a time, but also to enable finding them by year and month. I can also add more metadata fields than I can with Instagram. I could add country, type of landscape and more. I can practice building a CMS from the ground up. In letters of motivation I wrote about learning about Media Asset management tools from the ground up, and now out of curiousity, that is what I am doing.


It has taken a while to understand how Javascript works, but now that I have I can spend more time experimenting and learning each day. My increasing proficiency will be shown through the projects I build in courses, but also the self-led project.


Sometimes I add comments to commits, to explain what I found hard, and then I show the code that resolved the issue. If you’re curious as to why I would use a self-hosted json file and media files the answer is simple. I don’t need to go through the process of asking for permission to acccess an api to access my own data. For an example of working with ajax and json you can refer to this project.


And Finally


When you work in the media and broadcasting you constantly need to look for opportunities, to face rejection, and continue looking. With the skills I am learning now people are already interested, and that is the reason to change from skills that are less interesting, to those that are.

Playing with Fire(fox Developer Edition)

Playing with Fire(fox Developer Edition)

Byrichard

Google Chrome was misbehaving recently so I started to explore other browsers. By explore I mean try browsers that I had used plenty of times in the past. As I did this I came across Firefox Developer Edition.


Firefox Developer Edition is fun because it allows you to see everything that’s going on. If you’re studying HTTP headers then you can watch that traffic. If you’re trying to evaluate which parts of a page are loading slowly you can see that. If you want to look at media items loading that is possible too.


Network traffic for Tribune De Genève.


The advantage of this browser is that it allows you to play around and experiment as you work on your websites and get answers efficiently and effectively. It’s a one stop solution to getting plenty of answers without using a collection of websites and tools. It is now my default browser.


You can read a more comprehensive description of the browser’s features on their webpage.


The next step would be to follow a new web development course online, and as I experiment and learn about using frameworks I will be able to determine how useful this tool is.


So far I like it.

Day 64 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – “When I’m 64”
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Day 64 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – “When I’m 64”

Byrichard

Earlier today or yesterday at some point I was thinking of the song When I’m 64, and that I should share it. I’m not 64. Quarantine hasn’t aged me so drastically. I felt the need to make that joke.


Recycling


For the first time in two months I went to the recycling centre today. For at least two months I cleaned everything that could be recycled and sorted it into the correct bag. I was waiting for an auspicious time to take all this stuff to the recycle centre and today was that day.


I still spent more time waiting in the car, to get into the recycling centre, than actually in the centre. I’m organised with recycling so that it takes me seconds rather than minutes. I need to improve my paper recycling habits so that I can take seconds, as I do with everything else. Years ago I used to be disorganised about how I sorted things. I became systematic because I wanted to make the process almost instantaneous and it works.


Post Pandemic Spring Clean


Some writers or journalists were encouraging people to spring clean at the height of the pandemic but this made no sense to me. Why would you want to generate more rubbish and more things to recycle when going to recycle would take hours rather than minutes?


It feels nice to have finally got plastic, aluminium, PET, Glass and other things back under control. The next stage is to “turn the home into a museum” stage. It’s my way of saying “cleaning a place so that you can no longer tell that someone lives there.”


In a few weeks the idea of having guests may no longer be an alien concept so we might as well be ready.


Those Who are Alone and Want To Do Something Social, and Those Who Are Not, but Behave cruelly.


On social Media and Activities websites you see that there are two types of people. Those who are desperate to do something social, after two months of solitude, and those who are cruel and make it clear that they want to exclude people. It’s cruel because self-isolation and solitude are hard. I’m impatient for the chance to go hiking with people, of cycling with people, of shaking hands, or even simply having a conversation at a normal distance.


The Number of New infections in Switzerland faceplanting.


Although faceplanting is not an academic term it does reflect how impatient I am for the pandemic to be over so that I can get back to having a life in the physical world. By physical I mean handshakes and riding in the same car as someone else. It’s been at least 64 days since I did either.


Web Mastering


At the moment my biggest investment of time is working on my website. I’m making sure that I understand the bits of CSS that I am learning and applying them to page after page. It may be time consuming and repetitive but the goal is to learn, and master new skills. Repetition is my friend.


It’s also a way of working on a new portfolio while considering another career pivot. If the pessimists are right and we still have months of solitude and self-isolation then web mastering is a good direction to take.


And Finally


It’s easy to feel down for several hours a day during a pandemic and we need to find methods by which to stay sane and to stay stable. I believe that to a large extent I have but this is fragile.


We don’t know whether we will be able to socialise this summer. If we can’t then we have to survive another winter of solitude.


Take a look at the legacy part of my website. My Weathering page will make you dream of hiking.


If you have pictures of mountains outside of Europe I’d be interested. Leave a comment below

Day 63 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A 15 Kilometre Loop

Day 63 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A 15 Kilometre Loop

Byrichard

Today I walked a 15-kilometre loop because I saw people walking two abreast and decided to retrace my steps a short distance before trying a new bifurcation. By the end of this walk, my legs were starting to get tired. I walked non stop for over two hours before a quick stop at a petrol station to get some drinks before heading home.


Before going on my walk I finished the CSS course on Linkedin Learning before starting another one on HTML. It’s not that I need to learn about HTML so much as I have a desire to complement what I already know.


After passive learning I re-worked some more pages on the HTML part of my website, adding CSS to two or three pages. As a result of what I have learned over the last two or three weeks doing the same thing as I did for the index page for another directory took half an hour or less. What I learned is sticking in my memory. I still cut and paste, but the process is much faster.


Links from HTML Essential Training by Jen Simmons


The more I look up and learn, the more ideas I have for how to modernise my website. For ages I wanted to keep my website as a museum of what the web used to be but as I made pages mobile friendly that desire to keep things the same has altered and now I want to modernise it.


From a visitor point of view this may be a waste of time, as certain parts of the website have little to no traffic. This doesn’t matter, because in the grand scheme of things every page I modernise gives me experience in dealing with CSS, Javascript, navigation design and more. I may be slow on the first pages but as I work my way through the website my efficiency will go up, and with that so will my employability.


We constantly need to learn skills and working on a website, rather than browsing social media, is a great way of doing so. As I looked through Flickr galleries I saw that some people have images of people re-enacting Roman soldiers and other people have images of Rome as it looks today. I could easily breath life back into that part of the website by contacting people and getting permission to share their images.


I’m glad I am working on my website as a project again. It is effectively filling my time, encouraging me to learn more, and getting me ready for a line of work I enjoy.


See you tomorrow.

Day 39 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Taking Portraits of Cows

Day 39 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – Taking Portraits of Cows

Byrichard

I spent a few minutes taking portraits of cows during my afternoon walk today. Cows were standing by the barrier so it was easy to go up to each one and take their portraits. It’s not as if our vibrant social lives enable us to take portraits of people when we’re self-isolating. It’s day 39.


Daily walk day 39


Mobile First Website


This morning for three hours or so I continued working on making webpages mobile first and resubmitted them for indexing by Google. In the process I thought about how I have images that I could use to illustrate some of the points about geography, rock formations and other topics.


In the process I realised that some pages have been online for their fourth decade now. They were uploaded in the 90s, the navigation style was changed in the 2000s, they were dormant in the tens, and now in the 20s they’re mobile compliant. A side effect of this is that they now have a page load score of 100.


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Planning A New Section For My Website.

Byrichard

Today I’ve spent time looking at the website earnings and I’ve seen that with just a few minutes of work I’ve doubled the earnings from my website. I’m not going into the details at the moment but since I seem to be doing nothing productive I’m going to re-work my website to increase my earnings.

Four hundred and sixty visitors passthrough this website with about a million six hundred hits of which most visitors, through search engines get straight to the page they want. What I need to do over the next few days is making sure that there is advertising on most of the pages. in so doing I increase the opportunity for people to click through and find more relevant content on someone else’s web page.

I need to write more articles, rather than blog posts. Blog posts are a lazy method of web mastering because they require no real effort. Find an idea, write about it, post it. At least when you create a page you think about the content. I’ll start by writing a section about a variety of podcasts I’ve enjoyed over the past two years and hope that what I write will be appreciated by others.

Through this process I will be targeting a specific audience, trying to create relevant content and as a result get more visitors.

When working on the Roman section of this website I ran out of knowledge, therefore, the speed at which I added content plummeted. There is one page that I’m proud of from the time. It’s the one on Slavery. I spent several hours doing research, writing notes, and then uploading this page to the website. As a result of the quality of content universities and a number of other reputable websites linked to my own. That’s what I plan to do with the new sections I will add on podcasts I enjoy listening to and why.

It’s going to take a few days to generate this new section but since I’m between studies and work it’s one way of attempting to get a small secondary income. We’ll see how it goes.