Two weeks ago I decided to quit my regular job and become a fulltime Steem developer/curator/contributor.
Time for a quick overview on my first weeks new routines.
7:30 AM. Time for some excellent coffee.
No more trash, filthy highway restaurant coffee or some pads. No. I upgraded to a french press machine, having a totally relax zen feeling on making my coffee.
I'm using strong beans, not too greasy, not too light, just perfect for my taste. The process of making coffee with a french press is a delicate one, and every step is important. The temperature of the water, the amount of time your coffee grounds wet, dissolute and diffuse, the way you poor the water, really everything. It takes some time to master the process near perfection for the taste you like, but it's worth the time. Did I mention it makes me feel relaxed actually having time to make some fresh coffee?
A very good article about using a french press can be found here
After reviving from the dead (after coffee, ETA unknown)
So after taking 2 cups of coffee, it's time to hit my space key and see my three monitors light up. First things first: Open mRemoteNG, SSH into my servers and check their status. All good? Proceed with checking steemprices.com and update my witness price feed.
Once everything seems fine on my servers, I'll check the witness channel on steemit.chat for possible updates, bugs, or any kind of news that may be important for the network and/or the services I run and provide. After these steps, I'll start greeting people on the chat channels, or in private messages. The steemit chat window goes to my outer right monitor and stays open throughout the day to catch messages if needed.
In a separate window on the same monitor I leave the 'new' section open and hit F5 about 2x per hour to search for new, refreshing and good contents to curate.
Coding time! Well, almost that is.
I currently have 11 projects to complete. 8 of them are steem related projects, 3 others are projects i agreed on before quitting my job. As a software developer, I created my own system to track progress on my projects. Right now I'm using this for about 8 years and it works like a charm. Everything is well organized, and it's easy to see what task I need to proceed with.
A major time consuming step in application development is planning the development stages. Consider it like the building plans for your future house; Without them, you'll just end up with a pile of bricks stacked together that may look like a house, but will fall apart soon. It may have a nice exterior, but some day it will fail you if build without proper plans. So researching, modeling, and planning takes a lot of time.
Time to fire up my favorite tools that my project require, but mostly, I'll use Notepad++ and Jetbrains PHP storm. There are many cool IDE's out there, but for some reason i always return to using those for most of my projects. I love the simplicity they offer, and the way they are build. It's just good software, hands down. No need to reinvent the wheel, I keep using what has proven itself throughout my years as developer.
Isolation mode. Might as well be in jail.
Once I start coding, testing, debugging and all related steps my world exists between my chair and my 3 monitors. The world could seize to exist, I wouldn't even notice it during my isolation mode. Good weather, bad weather, friends, anything has to wait (except the kids) until after my isolation mode.
My keyboard wears out +/- every year, even tough i always stick to the (expensive) Logitech k800 with laser etched illuminated keys. Ink printed keys last only a couple of months until there is almost no ink left on the keys. So I type a lot of text.
The advantage of new technology, new coding languages and frameworks is they save you an awful lot of time rewriting code. In the early days, before OOP, a simple MDI application could hit 25.000 lines of code just like that, it didn't have to be complicated to reach that amount of lines. One of my biggest projects ever had over 410k lines of code, and over 190 different modules and classes. What a mess that was...
Today, we take a script or module with over 1500 lines of code as some heavy piece of code. Be glad you never had to program something 15 years ago. 1500 lines of code did nothing more but saying hello world in a pop up :-)
The 'Wtf? Is it 2 AM already??' part.
Once my but starts hurting, my fingers are cramping up, and I'm running out of cigarettes it's time for some sleep. Every single day I look at the clock and see it's close to 2 AM before I realize i have to snap out of my isolation mode.
So I came to the conclusion that quitting my job actually gave me more work.
I enjoy living the way I do right now. This is what I wanted to reach, this is what I needed!
Even tough I'm working more than ever before, mostly related to Steem projects, I consider myself lucky on having the time for whatever i need it. I do have some responsibilities in life, so it doesn't mean in abusing the free time. I'm using it at a bare minimum to focus at maximum.
So now, lights out, TV on, falling asleep while watching some episode of Mr Robot, and see you all tomorrow 7:30 AM!