Addicted To Learning

You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet recently.  Part of the reason is that I’ve had a bit of a case of Bloggy Writer’s Block.  A bigger reason, though, is that I’ve gotten addicted.  Addicted to learning.

In my field, web development, you need to always keep moving.  You need to keep picking up new skills, learning new technologies, all while keeping your existing skills polished.  If you don’t, you risk being left behind.  Of course, life always tends to get in the way – making sure I don’t have enough time to keep up on everything.  In addition, there’s a certain comfort to doing things the way you’ve always done them and a certain scariness of doing something a new way.  So it can be very easy to sink into a morass of "do it the way we’ve always done it and change nothing."  Once you get into that morass, it can be tough to get out.

I wouldn’t say I was in that morass, but I saw myself headed in that direction so I took action and decided to learn some new skills.  My first target was Bootstrap.  Bootstrap is a web development framework that was first developed by Twitter.  I had heard that it made it extremely easy to develop responsive websites – that is, websites that reformat themselves to display on computers, tablets, and handheld mobile devices.  This is something I was able to do myself, but I had heard that Bootstrap made this much easier.

Boy, did I hear right.  As I watched the video, my mind was blown.  Before I even finished the video, I couldn’t wait to apply this newfound knowledge to make something awesome.  I’m thinking a page to encourage someone to hire me for freelance projects would be appropriate.  What better use of a showcase of my new skills?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to learn some more so I can make an even more awesome website.

NOTE: The "Learn Icon" above is by ousia and is available via OpenClipArt.org.