Checking In
Tags: update, preview
Published: 2018-02-03 18:50:31

---
title: Checking In
published: true
description: It's been a while since I've published a blog post, so I'm checking in to share some stuff that's coming up.
tags: update, preview
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/rnrcg1zovdljrnoq1fdi.png
---


Hi!  It's been almost four weeks since my last blog post, so I need to write *something* to keep things flowing.  This will just be an update on what's been going on and what's coming up.

## So Far This Year

This year, my wife and I have tried to set some concrete goals for ourselves and stick to them.  It's working out well so far, but it's definitely making it harder to juggle everything at once.  We've joined a gym *and* an East Bay community basketball league, trying to be more active.  As it turns out, when you burn a lot of energy exercising, it leaves you with less motivation to do things like write blog posts and code after work.  Hence the situation I now find myself in.  But, I find that as I get more used to doing less Netflix and video games, I'm getting more used to being productive by default.

I've joined the [CodeNewbie Challenge 2018](https://2018.codenewbie.org/), which is a guided, community-based process of meeting coding goals in 2018.  

![CNC 2018, because this year will be different](https://assertnotmagic.com/img/cnc2018.jpg)

There are four tracks: Start Coding, Code More, Blog More, and Get a Job.  I'm working on the Code More goal and trying to schedule out some milestones and tasks in order to make progress and actually finish some side-projects.  Already, working on my projects has really helped me learn more and dig deeper into Ruby, and it's starting to rain blog post ideas.

Also, I submitted a talk proposal to [Deconstruct Conference](https://www.deconstructconf.com/), so… fingers crossed!

## Coming Up

Another reason that I haven't had a post come out recently is that I've been working on **something pretty big** that should come out in the next couple of days.  I'll be sure to share a link to it when it does.

**Update 2/5/18:** I guest-published a post on Simple Programmer!  [Getting Things Done: A Productivity Guide for Programmers](https://simpleprogrammer.com/getting-things-done-productivity-guide/) is up on their site now.  (Image courtesy of Simple Programmer)

![Getting Things Done Banner](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/szua2t889rr3tg3cxhj4.png)


Lastly, I wanted to share some of the blog post ideas that I've got now that I want to work on.

 - Closures - why they are more useful and interesting than you think

 - My Compiler Can Beat Me Up

 - Teaching the Art of Stepping Through Code

 - I Discovered Bullet Journaling and It's Neat

 - Powershell is Awesome Once You Get the Basics

 - Building a CLI with [Clamp](https://github.com/mdub/clamp)

 - Demystifying Building a Gem with Bundler: Load Paths, Require Statements, and Running Scripts

Let me know if any of these topics are more interesting to you than any of the others and I'll know which ones to prioritize.  Good things are coming!

<hr>

*Originally posted on [`assert_not magic?`](https://assertnotmagic.com/2018/02/03/checking-in/)*