self-development – My Journey to App Success

Having never blogged before, I followed my intuition to set up my critical reflective journal last week, as best I could. I knew what I wanted to do, but couldn’t figure out how to do it, without assistance. So, I thought it would be a good idea to invest some time in learning how to use WordPress properly this week.

I did search on Lynda and found the tutorial video series: “WordPress 5 Essential Training” with Morten Rand-Hendriksen

This was a great, and relatively short, introductory course, which quite quickly helped me to see that a WordPress post is built up using blocks. I had been trying to use it like a word processing packages and getting quite puzzled (and a little frustrated) when my text wasn’t behaving as I expected it to.

Following the guidance of the tutorial video series, I feel like I have now grasped the main concepts quite well, and have managed to publish a number of posts that are easily navigated through the menu, category and tag systems that I have in place.

As I work through the rest of the module I will continue to experiment and learn more of the capabilities of WordPress, in an effort to eventually achieve blog that serves me well and I am proud to present.

This week, we’re diving into the nuts and bolts of app development tools.

I see app development as being a talent that comprises of three major components (in order of my perceived importance):

Technical skills
- the ability to build a robust product that satisfies a brief, employing the most appropriate and effective tools.
Business acumen
- identifying opportunity in the needs and wants of the market and creating a business model to deliver a financially viable solution that the market is prepared to pay for
Artistic flair
- applying creativity and psychology to a product in order to provide an emotional and pleasurable user experience

In a team development environment, it’s important to get the right balance of these three components, by carefully selecting team members that possess the necessary skills and experience in at least one of these components. If career intentions lie in working within a development team, focusing on just one of these areas to cultivate a particularly marketable level of expertise, could be considered a good strategy.

However, my objectives for the creation of a startup venture, will see me operating as a lone developer (initially, at least). It is therefore vital that I strive to make significant progress with all of these competencies to maximise my opportunity to make a success of it.

This conceptual web diagram is a representation of where I see myself at this point:

Of course, this is a subjective assessment, purely based on my own perceived achievement to date, largely drawing on a comparison with my peers. It is merely a representation of where I feel I’m at, with no scientific quantification behind the scores at all.

My intention for this course is to develop my score in each of theses areas, to effectively increase the area of my triangle, representing my potential as an app developer.

Note that each of the scale ends have an arrow, pointing toward infinity, acknowledging my appreciation for endless learning opportunity and an ever changing world.

This week is where we get to work on developing my technical skills…

Tag: self-development

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