I set today, 1st December, as the date that I would do two things:

A) Come back to this post to review my progress over the past couple of months.

B) Deck the Halls ( I did that last weekend).

I'm pretty sure you're not here for the Christmas tree, but just in case.

As I currently work full-time in Marketing, and it's the run-up to Christmas, and the company I'm working for have just rebranded, I've been short on time and energy of late, but I've been doing my best to keep up with the coding since my goal to get into this full time remains.

So, let's look at my progression and see what's next...

Areas marked for improvement

Improve Foundational PHP

I did spend a little time initially going through challenges on Leetcode and code wars during breaks, but as much as I could. As In I wasn't taking as many breaks as I could 😬 (not good)

Learn the Laravel framework

Done a lot in this area, to the point where I'm comfortable with crud setups and I started learning to add on such as Breeze as well as exploring some of the's work, like the Modules package he maintains and his Laravel AdminTW.

It's been a lot of fun, and I've had some great moments, from going from 'I will never remember all these steps to remembering all the steps and way more as I built a frontend and backend practice project for recording FAQ's complete with validation, login, categories all without reference - except for categories.

I've improved my form building a lot and also my use of Laravel blade.

Get better with layouts and CSS

I had so much fun with this that I decided to practice building 6 common layouts, which was challenging; I tried building a parallax, again challenging, and put a front end into some of my Laravel projects, as well as learned how to build scripts work.

I didn't get along with the Codepen practice projects; in fact, I forgot I started October with good intentions, but the theme was Halloween, and it felt a bit wishy-washy.

Improve foundation knowledge of JavaScript.

Does dabbling in Livewire count?

Could have done more here. I got demotivated when trying to work with JS in Laravel and forgot to run the build script since I didn't know I could work in dev mode.

Database

Well, technically, I've been using Databases in Laravel. I've not been learning much about databases independently, and Laravel does make it easy. I've gotten the hang of connecting using a little MySQL from the CML in PHP Storm.

TODO That said, there is a lot I could learn about specificity when selecting records. when using Laravel. I also would like to learn more about MySQL outside of the laravel system and practice with that.

Be competent with dev environment and tools

Feel more fluent in PHP Storm.

Portfolio building

I have only really just started feeling ready enough to build practice projects, so I intend to get some stuff on my website and GitHub soon.

Overall

I think I've done as much as I can have expected from myself; outside factors have influenced my motivation and energy, but I've tried to keep my goals alive and remember what I'm trying to achieve here.

There have been a few days where it has been harder than others, but I can see that coming to an end soon. Since early September, I've only had 1 bad week of not doing anything, and in fairness, I needed it.

I will revisit my progress, and I think 3 months might be better, so I will return on March 1st or another update.

Cya then