Getting better at something is a skill. I’ve learned that the hard way over the past few months. Deliberate practice is key to improvement and I’ve been doing a whole lot of deliberate practice.

Most of my time is split between brushing up on data structures and algorithms, working on portolio projects, or applying for jobs. It has been exhausting, but I am improving at an unprecedented pace.

Writing Go code has been eye opening in a lot of ways. I hardly understood concurrent design and rarely bothered with pointers (even when the language I used supported them). But Go emphasizes these things. I know the applications and cost of passing by value or reference. I understand channels and goroutines and why they are such powerful tools.

The next step is to use these concepts and cement them in my mind through a project. I’ve been playing with a toy blockchain implementation and that has been fun, but I really want to create a web app utilizing microservices. Something that can scale through concurrent design.

Anyway, I’m rambling a little bit. The point of this post is just to document some of my improvements as I go.

As of right now, I need to brush up on my front end skills. I plan on trying out ember.js and if that isn’t a good fit I’ll go back to React/Vue/Svelte. In addition to that, I want to learn FastAPI and write some more Python. Go is great, but I need to keep those Javascript and Python skills up to date.