Learning WinDev in an hour a day

Like a lot of Clarion devs trying out WinDev, I have a problem: I have a regular job. I spend most of my working hours consulting on a massive Clarion project. That means I don't have a whole lot of time for learning new skills. 

But skill development is critical for software developers, because software development is constantly changing. The tools get better, the techniques improve, and every few years it seems some completely new technology appears on the horizon that offers/demands a different approach to building applications. 

That's also probably the main reason I'm still here writing code. I bore easily. 

An hour a day

I've realized the only way I'm going to learn WinDev is by carving out a block of time each day. I'm going to take an hour each morning to work my way through one task or another, and I'll report on my progress here. 

Well, almost every (working) day

Although I often do end up doing some work on the weekends, I'm going to restrict my WinDev daily hour to the work week as much as possible. That still leaves five days, right?

Only on Friday mornings I get up for a class at 5:30 and don't get back until somewhere around 8. And Fridays are also webinar days for ClarionLive and sometimes WxLive. So I'm making Fridays optional. 

So I'm aiming for four entries per week. And just to be clear, when I talk about learning WinDev in an hour per week I'm talking about an hour of my time. It'll take you a lot less than that to read my posts. But if you'd like to follow along with your own hour per day, that would be terrific. Let me know how it goes - I look forward to reading your comments! 

What kind of class starts at 5:30 on a Friday morning?

This is kind of a long story.

I said I believe in skill development, right? That extends beyond programming. 

I've been living in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada for about fifteen years now. Winnipeg is on the eastern end of the Canadian prairie, where winters are long and cold. People play a lot of ice sports here. A few years back we signed up our then-seven year old daughter for ringette, which is sort of like hockey in that you play it on skates but you use a ring instead of a puck (and the actual play is a lot more like basketball). 

It's amazing all the new friends you make when you have kids, and in the last couple of years there's been some talk among the dads about getting together for some casual hockey, more commonly called having a game of shinny. Last winter a bunch of us got together a few times at the local community center, at around 9 p.m. on a weeknight. There's almost always someone on the outdoor rinks at that time of night, but the way shinny works is you just start playing and if anyone who's already there wants to join in, so much the better. Most people wear helmets, some where shin guards, but usually that's it for protective equipment. No goalies, no slap shots, no (intentional) contact. If scoring is too easy, only goalposts and crossbars count.

Now, I grew up on the left coast where the water is liquid in winter; I'd probably skated no more than a dozen times as a kid and not much more as an adult, and I couldn't stick handle my way out of a wet paper bag. So when I stepped (nearly fell) out onto the ice, my suckage at the game of shinny was epic. But I still had a lot of fun, and I actually improved somewhat over the course of those games. 

Amazingly, it turns out I'm not the only one in this city who didn't grow up on skates. There are classes for people like me, so I signed up for one called Adult Power Skating and Hockey Skills. I've had four sessions so far, and although I got off to a rough start ("okay, for this drill we're going to do backwards crossovers while stickhandling") I'm having a blast with it now. 

Thankfully the class doesn't at 5:30 a.m.; it starts at 6:30 a.m. and goes for an hour. But it takes me about fifteen minutes to get to the rink. And full protective gear is required, so it takes a while to get suited up. And I like to get on the ice for ten to fifteen minutes before the class so I can work on what I learned the previous week. We have 45 minutes of drills followed by a scrimmage which often runs to about a half hour because no one's on the ice after us (which should tell you something). 

I'm one of the oldsters in that class - it wouldn't surprise me if I learned that I'm the oldest by a year or two. Most are in their thirties and forties. And I hope I don't blow out a knee or something.

But it's pretty cool to be learning something new. 

First installment

Look for the first installment on Wednesday, May 9 2012. All installments will be available from this page, and I'll also post notices on the WinDev home page.