My One Month Learning Plan

I have a confession to make. Lately I’ve felt like my skills have been slipping, or at least stagnating. Part of it is because I’ve been so busy, but part of it is because of feeble excuses like, “I’ve been so busy.” This year I’ve resolved to do a whole bunch of things, including learn more. Before I WordCamp Phoenix, I devised a plan that would take place pretty much the moment I landed back in Scranton; WordCamp Phoenix really reinforced I need to do this. So, here is my one month learning plan.

Week 1: January 19-25

Read Professional WordPress: Design and Development by Brad Williams, et al. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf far too long. I’m going to read through, bookmark pages, and make much needed fixes to some of the code I have in the wild already. I’m really excited for this.

Week 2: January 26-February 1

Implement the things from the book in some project(s) I’ve been working on and release them into the wild; I’m thinking Github and possibly the WordPress Plugin Directory. This will help me: A) Launch a new project, B) Contribute to WordPress a bit more, and C) Immediately implement what I learned in the book.

Week 3: February 2-8

Look at scaling code in general. I want to be able to write better scalable code, design-wise and load-wise. There are a few books on the topic. I haven’t selected one yet, but I will be sure to update this post with what I choose. I’d really like to release something this year for mass consumption and it needs to be able to perform.

Week 4: February 9-15

It’s Sass week. I’ve already ready Dan Cederholm’s fantastic Sass for Web Designers but I want to actually start using it. Hopefully I can do this concurrently with the other weeks, but I will dedicate Week 4 to Sass regardless.

So there you have it! I will hopefully document the experience to let everyone know how it’s going and then a results post on what I actually did in the month. I’m excited- hopefully I’ll learn a thing or two!