The list of fun projects I am currently working on (outside of work) is getting a little out of hand, so maybe I can keep a running list going to help keep me organized.
- Caiters.com redesign – responsive redesign of my site, currently flat html/css and need to determine what I’ll do for a blog
- Daughters of the Alliance redesign – Going to make my WoW guild website responsive and also just get the content laid out better than it is right now. This may include testing out some new forum software for the guild and we might get this site off of WordPress
- WoW raid website – Project with my husband meant for guilds to handle raid signups in WoW. I’m going to be working on UX and responsive items for this one
- Book Club Fiction web app – ongoing project. It’s technically launched in beta, so just have to keep iterating to make it great!
- Responsive homepage rotator jquery plugin – I started building a plugin as practice since I’ve never built a plugin that I intended to use on multiple websites before. It should help reduce the amount of time I spend doing homepage rotators at work
- WordPress theme ideas – I have a couple of ideas for WordPress themes that would help me do more design work and also just be plain fun to do
- Video games blog – I have a Ghost blog that I have been using to just write about the video games I play. It’s technically up but I haven’t linked it from anywhere – it’s a work in progress though, and Ghost has been a lot of fun to use!
Overall my priorities are to do some more work on the book club site, then DotA = Caiters = WoW raid website > everything else. I’d like to believe I can juggle everything at once, but over the past few weeks of just trying to work on the book club site in my spare time, I’ve learned better!
Anyway, overall I’m just trying to spend more time coding than I used to. I spend a lot of time doing front end dev at work, but depending on the project I happen to be working on, the work may not have a lot of variety (and therefore not a lot of opportunities to learn). Sometimes I get to learn cool new stuff, and sometimes I’m working on a lot of the same old stuff I have been accustomed to for a while. At the same time, I am trying to push myself to try to figure out how some of these “same old, same old” projects can teach me something new, whether it’s by trying out new techniques or just trying to find a way to get my work done faster than before. I’m looking forward to continuing to get the chance to play with user experience design and just design things in general.
Next goal is to figure out how to balance this with family obligations (I have a very cute but very demanding 15 month old at home, along with a husband and a number of pets) and still have time to play video games too. I have to figure out the secret, and hope the secret isn’t as simple as not sleeping ever again!