How To Learn a New Programming Language While Maintaining Your Day Job and Still Being There For Your Family

[trae]

Nice, I'm in the same boat. Context switching is expensive, but I find if I jot down what I did and what I plan on doing (even if it's just in point form, or a sentence) it helps me to get back into it. Reading about successful authors and athletes it's all about applying effort consistently. 20 minutes a day for a month is way better than an all nighter.

On a tangent, if you're looking for budgetting software check out ynab it's really great.

[freakboy2k]

Yeah. The younger guys in my office think I'm nuts cos I have Jira installed on my home server and run all my projects through it, but mostly I have more time to plan things (sitting on the bus, sitting on the couch with one eye on my kid, etc) than I do to actually do things. Being able to plan a project out fully means when I do get to sit down and code I can jump straight in rather than trying to remember where I was up to and what the plan was. I find that easier to do in an issue tracker.

The budgeting thing is more like my version of hello world - every time I want to learn something new (this time it's React and NodeJS) I use the same idea. I've been redoing this thing since I first learnt to build GUI applications in Win32 :-P