Affan's Blog

In 2017 I created a blog post of things that I want to learn/achieve in 2017. And I already updated the outcome, check it out if you haven’t seen it :) Every year I always try to become more productive, this post is my attempt to announce my progress and goals, I hope I can keep this tradition and accomplish everything on this list.

Become an Avid Reader

Starting off with something that is not a programming goals. I started reading novels at 2017 and I love fantasy. Oh boy, I could talk about fantasy for hours, let’s save that for another post shall we?

When I was still in high school, I always use that 5 minutes between classes to read books. Now that I finished high school and have so much free time I found that I don’t read that often. Nowadays I only read several minutes before I sleep. I want to create a post of book that I’ve read and my reading list, so I could incorporate reading better on my daily schedule.

Draw More

Again, not programming. I promise next point is about programming, folks. I created this blog because I want to put all of my programming experience and knowledge here, I already have other website about my drawing. I think putting it in here is pretty good because drawing is my other big hobbies.

Right now my drawing is very scattered. I draw background here and there, drawing character, learning blender, drawing comics, there is too much of them that I can’t track. I hope by writing this I can sort my mind a bit.

My first goal is to create a comic. I already published one of my comic book, the indie way. I never draw comic anymore since I moved to Linux. Recently all of my friend moved into Webtoon platform, seems like that’s what all young kids likes to read nowadays.

The second goal is to create CG illustration. I love to see high quality art pieces. Especially from visual novel. My second goal is to draw as good as visual novel artist.

The third goal is to learn Blender. Recently I learn it from this awesome YouTube tutorial, also the sequel. Check them out, those are really excellent tutorials to learn Blender.

Learn Python

I’ve been programming with Python since I started. My first programming language was Python. Yet, I’ve only been creating small scripts here and there. I want to learn Python so I could create stuff with it, like game, software, web application, etc. Scripts are useful, I use them all the time, but I want to step up my game and create a real application with it.

I’m still not sure how I will accomplish this. The first thing I’d do is tidying up my Python script so it’s more manageable.

Learn Java

On my 2nd year of universtiy later on, I had to take Java and OOP class. Java is pretty popular on my country, you can create Android application with it too. I think I want to take some head start in this. I’ve downloaded IntelliJ IDEA and some Java books. Actually I made a post a long time ago, but I’ve never really study Java since.

Learn System Administration

I am interested in this as well. Thanks to this nice guy from Reddit for showing me the way. Basically he said:

• Keep using this tutorial because it is a good intro.
• Practice a lot and have a Linux machine to be my primary workstation.
• He uses Python a lot in his work to automate the more tedious portion of his job. He recommends Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.
• Get into the career is really hard. He started at a help desk and took as many projects as he could handle and tried to focus more on Linux.
• “If you are looking to start out, I’d say start as a Site Reliability Engineer or NOC tech or whatever the company calls there monitoring department. My company uses our SREs as our proving ground for getting into one of the IT departments (we have 2)”
• He never used this Udemy course but others in his department think it’s good.

Learn Japanese

Through my high school years, we had to pick Japanese as foreign language study. I am not that good, I think I’m still at N5 borderline-N4. I hope I can learn it more in 2018.

I installed an amazing app called TangoRisto. Is it a Japanese news app, but it has Furigana (little Hiragana on top of Kanji), and also if you tap a word it will show you the dictionary. It is an amazing way to learn Japanese by doing.

I do a lot of Anki, but by memorizing Kanji and words will only get you so far. People tell me to immerse myself into it. Read Japanese materials, read newspapers, read visual novel games, read children books, hear Japanese songs, watch Japanese cartoons, etc.

Conclusion

That’s what I want to learn. From my previous experience, putting bunch of random stuff into this list doesn’t work. I actually want to Learn Django/Flask, PHP, and WordPress too but I think it will just clutter this list.

I will make a follow-up post at 2019 to overview how my 2018 is going. So that’s it for 2018, I hope I can do it. See you next time.