Wed May 17 11:26:54 UTC 2017
Been a while, hasn't it, Stephan?
I've been legit busy, which is a better excuse than me being bad.
First things first, I've had my first ever real freelance gig! Just a small gig, agreed to a payment of $50 and gots paid $75 because he liked the work I did a lot. I consider it a first because it's the first time I worked for a stranger for monies.
I don't know this person personally, and it all worked out pretty well.
I also feel like it's going to lead to some momentum as far as personal productivity goes.
Wed May 17 11:36:28 UTC 2017
Anyways, I've had a bit of an epiphany. As a professional programmer, I think a big part of my job description is to be flexible. Flexible in what tools I use, what languages I program in, the style of my programming, and even the algorithms and data-structures I use.
Part of my gig was helping my client setup his environment how he wanted. He wanted to use Wing IDE, so I looked into it and got familiar with it. Even having avoided IDE land for a long time, I got familiar with it pretty quickly and was capable of telling it to do stuff I wanted it to do within a reasonable timeframe.
Wed May 17 11:45:55 UTC 2017
This is something I take for granted, but it's not something that can really be done that fast. All these tools/editors/languages have similarities or predictable contrasts that one must be aware of to look for.
I see how much more I need to learn and often think I can't do that much, but I am actually at the point where I can do a lot of things competently, and pick up certain things quickly. And that's valuable and something I can probably sell for a livable wage once I build a network or foundation of some sort.
Something worth exploring.
Wed May 17 11:50:07 UTC 2017
Anyways, one part of this thinking is that I'd like to learn how to avoid the command line to help those who don't want to deal with it. To setup my client's environment, I had him use powershell. I think I could've done everything from Wing IDE assuming python and wing were already installed.
I am going to explore this hypothesis now.
Wed May 17 12:00:57 UTC 2017
Yes, it is quite possible. Probably would've been easier to go down this path with client.