Need More Time! Week 3 Survival of the Fittest?

I found something that is far more difficult than programming this past week: time management. Even with my 30/30 app (iPad) and Do It Tomorrow (iPhone), I found myself falling behind in my attempt to do programming. I did do solid programming for about 1 hour of RoR and 20 minutes of Javascript early last week, but ever since the week became more hectic, it was more turning into Darwin’s survival of the fittest, and I wasn’t quite doing well when it comes to survival of programming.

I did borrow a copy of book on PHP and mySQL from library and read some of it one day during work. It was interesting, but like anything that involves computers, reading doesn’t really get you anywhere. I only frankly got the point that PHP is an odd halfway between HTML and Python in that it’s complex, but still so closely related to HTML of webpage. It also gave me another reason to think again why Javascript would be useful as well.

I haven’t really gone to look for any books in Ruby or Rails lately because 1) I’m not even really managing to get through the single book I was trying to do! and 2) I’m not really interested in learning Ruby, at least at this point, compared to how much I want to learn Rails. I’ve actually read quite a few reviews on the web and the book before I started learning Rails that you don’t need to be an expert on Ruby to practice Rails. And I think that’s a good point – I’m not saying learning Ruby is bad (obviously), but it seems doable with basic HTML and CSS background to go onto Rails with minimal Ruby background.

So, to my surprise, what’s been preventing me from getting more and more intense with programming was not the background I came from, but simply, time management. I think that’s why this is so hard to do – I’m sure there are tons of people out there who are perfectly capable of programming and maybe have ventured once or twice, but find themselves difficult to keep up because programming is seriously no walk in the park. I think anyone who says it’s possible to learn and become programmer by working one or two days a week is insane – you need to be inside computer or internet everyday, and at the end, that really comes down to time less than will. Less time you have, less willing you will be, and more likely that you will give up.

Obviously, I don’t plan to give up. I’ve already come too far, and there are a lot more things I want to learn. I’m just hoping time frees up more to practice and build upon what I’ve gathered to this point.

Follow me at Twitter @jiwpark00