For the past decade, nearly all the blogs and articles I've written were in a self-help style on communication and fitness.
I've neglected what made me fall in love with writing. Fiction. Stories. Crafting and drafting the absurd, while still finding ways to weave in emotional impact. That's why I was a writing minor to begin with!
With that passion reignited, I completed NaNoWriMo for the first time in 2022, and I hope to do it again this year.
Music is life! Whether it's rapping on mixtapes to stay in touch with friends overseas or teaching myself guitar to try to impress girls-- music is tied to so many influential memories. And yet, just like writing, I've neglected it for years.
I'm slowly studying drums, so I can build a better understanding to make my own beats. But honestly, I've been distracted with making mashups after figuring out the Camelot Wheel.
After I expand my catalogue of original tunes, I'll set up a proper Spotify artist page. In the meantime, I made a mock up with some of my best hits.
Choice YouTube playlists below:
Focus Nau (Focus Timer)
Why Make This?
The number one reason being I need it. I can try to block off time in the day to give myself a schedule, but there's no guarantee that those hours set aside will be productive. My brain handles chunks better than blocks, so I've had a lot more success with short bursts using a focus timer.
Learning Points
The mechanics of a countdown timer aren't too complex since you're just taking advantange of a decreasing incrementer (de-incrementer?). More than that, this project gave me the biggest growth and challenge in trying to create a design that's simple but appealing while being responsive to mobile layout. Originally I had tied a function to the refresh icon that would simply reload the entire page because I was having trouble creating the right type of function to restore the icons properly. It worked, but it had a slight delay, and it really hindered the responsive experience. Main tab focus pause
What's Next?
I'd like to add some sort of local storage component that could keep track of the spread of alloted time. For example, by end of day, you dedicated X hours for Business, Y hours for Study, and Z for Gaming. Could even throw in an experience bar and badges, but that sort of gamification never provided much incentive for me personally.
Jon Dao
I've worked as an educator and consultant to help others improve their personal skills.
Now, my goal is to help others on technical projects in narrative and audio design.
I plan to document my developer journey on this site, GitHub, and YouTube.
This site is just HTML, with vanilla CSS vanilla JS for now. Version 2 with React and Typescript is planned next.
