Where to start?

The ultimate question when I began was, where to begin? The weekend before I had written out some rough ideas of ideas I wanted to explore. Since my week was programming, I decided that my first course of action was to start a project. To dive into a new challenge, and build a site that I'd never tried before. This turned out to be the birth of this blog.

The First Project: Gatbsy Blog

Gatsby was a framework that I had heard about many times in the developer ecosystem. It was growing in popularity, people were touting its speed and usability. I had never built a blog before and so I took on the challenge.

As with most programming endeavours I start on, the first point of call is to find a great tutorial. For Gatsby, I found the official documentation was well written and easily to follow (unlike many others), so I started here.

I learned about the Gatsby building blocks, using their in-built Link components, and played around with module styling. Normally I would just work using a global stylesheet. I also had my first experience with Gatsby plugins - addons to your gatsby app that provide additional functionality or modifications - using Typography.js to set a global style for my blog. I managed to work through about half of the tutoral.

As I was working my way through the tutorial, I also started to formulize the idea for this blog.

Exploring the freelancing world

Without a job and seeking a new challenge, I decided to start looking into the freelancing space. I signed up to several sites like Upwork and Freelancer, and just spent some time looking at what the job advertisements required and how profiles were set up by successful freelancers.

I didn't end up making much headway with these sites in terms of freelancing beyond this Deep Dive week, mostly because I found other challenges and opportunities that I decided to follow. But it was worth taking the time to understand the space more

My thoughts on the day

I've been enjoying the challenge so far. It has mostly been learning (as I expect alot of this will be). I will attempt to ramp up the project tomorrow. In general my focus was high and it was a great start.