School’s out, and summer’s begun! As a software engineer who’s constantly looking for ways to improve, I started feeling a little empty after my finals ended last week. After spending some time reflecting, it boiled down to 2 things that seem to contradict each other:

• Having many things that I want to learn over the summer break

• Yet feeling a burnout just from looking at the list!

Tackling burnout!

We’ve all had that moment in life, where we’re so excited to do things we’re interested in, but at the same time, lack the motivation all of a sudden! Through trial and error, I have discovered that personally, what works best for me is to force myself to TAKE ACTION. A lot of times, we fail to take action, and end up wasting quite a bit of time that could’ve gone to doing the things we wanted to do. Whether it is burnout, being overwhelmed by the amount of things to do, jotting down these commitments and starting to tackle them one by one seems to work best for myself, try it out the next time you’re feeling this way!

Start of learning journey: Day 1 — Figma!

Today marks the first day of my journey, and for today, I started to peer into using Figma, something that I had been putting off since last year!

I started to look online for basic crash courses on Figma, as well as the certain uses of it that are more fine tuned for my use case as a developer!

(Shh, I could somehow never figure out how to use Figma intuitively, I think it’s a me problem)

After looking around, I went with one of my favourite coding YouTubers out there — Net Ninja! (Here is a link to his course, shout out to Shawn!)

I’ve been following Shawn for close to 3 years, since the beginning of my development journey, have really enjoyed his videos, and this one is actually a collaboration with Chris Pennington, another great teacher in the YouTube coding space.

For today, as it was the first day in the journey, I took it slow and just learnt some of the basics of:

• Installing and using Figma on the desktop
• Implementing a basic design system in Figma
• Using Frames, creating custom styles that can be reused throughout the different parts of the design file
• Using a Type Scale to better visualize our font sizes while designing! https://typescale.com/

These were nice eye-openers to myself as a fledging developer and it has been a great experience so far. Design has been a field that I haven’t taken to naturally, and I am excited to learn more about Figma and contribute to my future team, job and clients with it! To the start of the journey of learning new skills/quirks for the next 30 days!

Drop a comment if you’d like to hop on a similar journey, and feel free to share with me what your goals are and who knows, we could get started on something together in the foreseeable future!

Have a great day ahead!