A Big Picture

Spend most of your time investigating your subject, learning, improving yourself. And then write a lot. Create a lot of videos, a lot of podcasts. What ever you like to do.

Get in the habit of writing at a certain time, on a regular schedule. I like to write early. In the morning before my mind is cluttered and distracted by the events of the day. And then continue your research in the afternoon.

Then, sometimes, I like writing at the end of the day. Get in the habit of taking notes. Taking notes will slow your research down, but it will improving your story telling.

Python is the language I’m studying now. Start with HTML, CSS and Javascript, then move on to Python. HTML is the structure of your webpages, CSS is the look and feel of your website, Javascript is the activity in your website and Python is the artificial intelligence in your website.

Another system you need to get familiar with is Docker. Do some research about virtual environments. Virtual Box and VMware are the most popular virtual environments, by far. Qemu is a free and open source virtual environment for Linux.

Docker is the best system for building your development environment. Get Python and Docker installed. Get your web server Nginx or Apache installed. Test them and make sure they are working correctly.

Mariadb and PostgreSQL seem to be the most popular databases to build your websites with. What I’ve seen so far is that Mariadb works with more languages, but PostgreSQL is faster.

Git and SSH are another set of tools you will need. Git enables you to keep track of your development process, so you can go back to a previous configuration if you break something. And SSH enables you to connect to the remote server, where your live website is hosted.

As far as I know at this stage in my own personal development, you create a directory in your file system where you will store all your projects. I suppose you can have more than one directory, if you want to separate them into categories.

Then you create a directory for each project. You create an instance of Docker container within the directory and then you build your website within that container.

I’ve read about putting the database and other components in separate containers. I’m not sure how that works. Its just something to think about. It may be something you can use in your development ecosystem.

And keep writing on a regular basis. Blogging is another way to produce content. I just start writing directly into WordPress.

It might be a good idea to be more prepared. I’m very busy reading and watching video tutorials, trying to figure this all out. And then, when it is time, I just start writing a blog post.

Peace be with you and have fun making the world a better place.