Today I wanted to finish my last CSS drill; my multipage website. After that my plan was to continue slogging through Javascript practice/learning until the day finishes. A wrench I threw in my own gears was attending today's Learn to Learn breakout, which is actually part of what helped guide me on how to write this particular blog. Overall though my main goal was my CSS drill.

Once the breakout finished I tried something new when doing my work. Something I learned in the breakout was the existence of the site https://www.noisli.com/. I will often generally listen to music when I want to get into focus mode, but even that can occasionally be too distracting. I found on demand white noise like a thunderstorm with a crackling fire to be a nice alternative to some of my other music. It helped drown out the open space and let me focus just on my screen. In addition to that, I made sure I had my snack around 11AM and had plenty of fluids ready to keep me in my seat. I silenced my phone, snoozed less important Slack Channels, and made sure only my necessary windows remained open.

My challenge working on CSS today was a centered, but justified menu with pricing and descriptions. I ended up using Flexbox to pull this off; overall Flexbox makes more sense to me and for now seems like the generally better to use option instead of Flex Grid, but I should definitely look more into Flex Grid as I'm sure it can solve some problems more elegantly than I did with my divs inside of divs inside of divs using Flexbox. I finished my site shortly after lunch and spent the remainder of my day deep diving into the Javascript practice. I'm still having trouble understanding the overall structure of Javascript, but I know my Noisli seclusion absolutely helped me focus on what I was working on; I'll definitely use Noisli again, thanks James. Tomorrow I'll need to change my focus from Javascript and spend some time on my lightning talk as I'm lucky number 2 in the list.

Today a few of my goals are fairly low intensity/attention. I did not need to necessarily do anything special to get ready for writing my post about my first meetup; the hardest part was remembering names. After that though I shut out most of my social messengers and put the old headphones on to focus on some Galvanize Money. Overall this part of the unit seems to be building the basics for how to make simple functions to pull data from varying deeper and deeper points. I've made it through the first two drills so far, but I'm running through them again to make sure the info is actually present and I didn't just memorize the steps. I also tried to write them a few different ways when I could. Next on my list after feeling like I've got parts 1 and 2 fairly down, I'm going to move onto part 3. Completing unit 1 is just on the horizon!

I found that the type of music I was listening to made an impact on my work. I normally listen to calmer and few words/non english music like Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Ros, or Lo-fi Hip Hop. For Galvanize Money I actually found that music didn't help as much as when I switched over to more aggressive items like Orchid, ISIS, and KEN Mode. Similar to working out it seems the higher energy music helped me overcome my own obstacle of Galvanize Money. The takeaway from that would seem that if I'm trying to be creative, calmer and more experimental music helps me, but if I'm trying to problem solve, something more aggressive and rock/metal helps me.

My main focus for today is to both get this last Learn to Learn drill completed and at least start if not complete my personal site. Overall this will be good practice for deploying simple sites in the future. I'm heading upstairs, putting headphones on with more creativity inducing music, and not going to attend any breakouts today.

I have more or less finished my site at this point, other than this post which I will add to it once complete. I was successfully able to focus today and have just about finished with what I set out to do. The music choices were effective. In my site I at some point got a little too complicated, trying to add some DOM elements even though I didn't really need to do so; I ended up altering my CSS instead since everything is static. In the future, as this is essentially a blog with multiple pages I will look more into doing more dynamically.