When you're studying something intensely, and working on something for a long time it is easy to begin to feel burnt out or start to lose your passion. Maybe you might even become a bit lost, and ask yourself "Why am I doing this?" or "What is the purpose of what I'm doing with my life?".

Coding to me is an interesting field, but can become easily filled with moments of boredom. Programming, or learning to write code in JavaScript or Python may not be the most exciting job in the world especially if you're only trying to add a small piece of functionality to a larger project, however sometimes it can be rewarding, when you can come up with a solution to a JavaScript feature for a website, or finally understand what closures are!

So how does minimalism help me with coding?

Well, I think that often times like computers if there's too much junk files scattered in a large repository, we will begin to get lost. However, once you refactor any duplicate code, pair down folders to a few you will begin to get a sense of clarity and enlightenment from understanding what you have and what you can do with them.

When I took the journey towards minimalism in 2014, I hadn't started to intensely program yet. It wasn't until I decided in summer of 2015 to stop pursuing my doctorate and focus on web development did I truly find how reducing my clutter mentally and physically was in fact the reason why I am able to focus more on the things that truly mattered.

During my doctoral program I would read hundreds of publications from book chapters to journal articles. I would have piles of these printed out, marked and highlighted. But I was scattered and didn't understand necessarily what I was aiming for, what my goal was in the mountain of paper before me. But through minimalism, I was able to start re-evaluating the meaning of my actions.

Understanding why you do something is just as important as how you do it. For me, when I think about programming from the lens of a minimalist, I see that when I code I must understand how that function or framework is practical to the development of my site or app. Refactoring and making sure my code is DRY is all related to the minimalist mindset. After all, when data scientists and journalist find patterns in repetition, and summarize them down into a meaningful chart or article, we as humans benefit from the condensed down albeit informative piece of data.

So, I just wanted to remind those who are focusing on programming, and also happen to love the concept and lifestyle of minimalism, there is very much a common convergence between these two. I believe that by making sure that my life is sorted and has a proper place, it really has helped me to find more solace when I code. And while you're developing ideas and projects to build your skills up, having a cause that you believe in really helps make coding much more interesting. Algorithms and code challenges are good for understanding how to find ways to more efficient functions, but using your knowledge for meaningful and purposeful projects will really make programming an exciting and long-lasting career path.

Minimalize and keep on coding!

Sometimes beginning something new can be difficult, especially if you do not have a set time frame to check whether you've actually accomplished something. I decided that in order for me to start living more consciously I needed to challenge myself. That's why I decided to start a 30 day zero waste challenge. I call it Zero Waste 30 akin to phrases from popular whole food, natural diets.

If you've researched and read about zero waste, you probably came across this troubling statistics that says "the average person produces at least 4.3lb of waste per day"! I'm sure you are probably as shocked as me about this information, and wonder what the heck are we throwing away? My goal starting today is to reduce the weight of my trash to less than 4.3lb per month or less than that. I want to break the vicious cycle of consumerism and wastefulness, and instead focus on how can I live more mindful of the things we put into our environment.

Everyone is concerned if they put something unhealthy into their bodies, so why are we accepting of adding pollution to our planet? We share this one place and must learn to better protect it. Not only will this Zero Waste 30 Challenge help you reduce your waste, but also help you learn to live a more mindful and healthier life.

Hopefully after 30 days I will have some good results. But I hope to continue improving my results each month, so don't just see this challenge as 30 days and that's it, but as a stepping stone to reach a goal of reducing what used to be several pounds of trash a day to a couple of months or several years. Let's do this for us, let's do this for the planet!



This is also a nice podcast with Lauren Singer that talks about Zero Waste (Warning: Lots of foul language, not for the faint of heart):

Learning more about plastics and how science is working on ways to create biodegradable plastics can help improve the situation where plastic now has contaminated our land and water systems. However, by keeping up the following cycle of reduce, refuse, reuse, recycle will help decrease and divert the amount of plastic going into our ecosystems. I myself try to reduce things we buy that comes in unnecessary plastics. One thing that the Dnews videos pointed out was that plastic is in almost every piece of technology we currently use. However, it's not that we can forgo plastics, but that we can reduce our daily consumption of it, especially of the single use or disposable kind. Again, follow the idea that by consuming less and consuming more consciously you will help to eliminate harmful chemicals and trash getting into our environment.

I wanted to write about topic I feel not many people are talking much about. Growing up in a low-income neighborhood in Northern Kentucky, I was just lucky enough to get out of the public school system without falling into drugs or ending up pregnant like many of my classmates had done. I went to the local university and got my degree. But, one thing I wondered about as I change careers from an academian to a web developer, and look at all the great developers out there, is Who Can Become a Developer?

Many of the great developers in the field came from amazing technical schools like MIT, Stanford, and Rochester. We all know that although Mark Zuckerberg didn't graduate college, he did attend Harvard, and that Steve Jobs was twiddling with engineer friends in garages in sunny Silicon Valley. When I was growing up as a kid, I had a rough backyard connected to three houses, and my playground was a cracked sidewalk, and I didn't get a computer until around 1997 which I had to share with my two sisters. My parents didn't speak English. I didn't have Algebra until I was in high school, and when I went to college I only took a linear math class and that was it.

The internet was growing and maturing around the 2000s, but I barely heard about its importance until just recently in the late 2010's when Google and Apple began producing amazing technologies, and spewing out the word Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Although not everyone is cut out for the web development world, I just wonder how many poor background people do actually reach up in the world of programming given they had to start at a later stage in life? Or was I the one that was just a bit late?

I'm writing this because today I decided to start an online coding school called Thinkful. It's a 6-month program that's suppose to provide full stack knowledge in things like node, express and react. I really hope to learn the ins-and-outs of the development world, but after reading this crazy article about learning JavaScript in 2016 and this other one about the state of JavaScript, I feel like I'm still very far behind. Starting late in the game is a pretty tough ordeal, but giving up I think would be even more disappointing. There's so much to learn, and if I stop now, I know I will be missing out on some amazing things in the future.