2026-08-19
My seemingly random switch to Java within my learning tracker wasn't quite so random, but it is my last day for that switchover. Today is the last day that it will matter because tomorrow is the day I was preparing for.
I really feel that I did everything that I could with the time that I had, which lasted about 9 days. I hope it will be enough, but at this point it's out of my hands. It may have never mattered in the first place, but no effort is wasted. It's not often that I feel like I gave something my all. I didn't go overboard and burn out, but I also really tried to absorb the information, practice it, and not blast through it. I usually procrastinate on these sorts of things and end up panic-reviewing in the last 5 minutes and ending up wildly unprepared. The learning habit I've built around this Digital Garden has definitely helped me in this regard.
What's funny is that I've actually enjoyed this detour. It's a cute new little winding path in the garden. I'm not usually a fan of sitting down and learning for learning's sake, but following my curiosity and focusing on hands-on examples made it a lot more bearable, and some of the resources I learned from were a lot more conversational than the usual cut-and-dry textbook-style text.
I'm hoping that I can get back to following my true curiosity after this. I want to spend more time adding some new features to my garden as I talked about yesterday; in particular I'm really itching to build some kind of interesting (but basic to start) minigame or api data visualization for this page, which means I need to figure out server hosting for the site.
I feel ready. We'll see what happens.