Initial Briefing

This post is here to lay down the ground rules of this particular blog. At least the ground rules for now, I tend to tweak things to fit my style as I move through life, so we’ll see what happens. Without further ado or anymore preamble, let’s get into it!

The whole point of this blog is to learn new things. Learning something new can take 1 hour or it can take several years depending on the discipline, but I should be able to make noticeable progress within a month. I will give myself a maximum time period of one month into learning a new skill to report my experiences back to you.

In terms of the learning materials and resources I will use, they will mostly be free to access via the internet or other methods e.g. free courses or lessons provided by the local council, friends or educational institutions.

If the access to free resources is minimal or there are not enough resources to make a clear impact on my skills, I will opt for paid courses; within a reasonable price range. Now don’t get me wrong, I WANT to learn things for free, but sometimes the most beneficial resources are behind a paywall. Of course, I will make sure to keep costs to a minimum, if not for myself then for other people who may want to do the same thing. I will only get courses on sale or at a discount to me, and they also must be accessible on both PC and mobile devices if I want to learn on the go.

Once I am confident in the amount of learning I have completed, I will subject myself to a test or practical exam to see if my efforts have been well placed. Now, other than this being a form of torture, it should give you an idea of how much you can learn using free resources that should be accessible to a large amount of people. Or it will give you an idea of how bad I can do on a test, but at least that would be very entertaining! These tests will either be set up by friends and family who want to see me suffer, the instructor of the particular course, or I could ask someone on the internet for a favour via Reddit. Either way, I will make sure the test is not biased towards making resources seem better than they are. I’m all about integrity!

Finally, I will rate the resources that I use out of 10 and give them a recommendation if I think they would be useful to other people who want to learn the same skill or technique.

To recap, or for those of you who are riding that TL;DR wave:

1. I will give myself a time limit of one month to learn a skill or technique before I report back.
2. I will use free resources accessible via the internet, a friend or by a government-funded scheme.
3. I will pay for resources if the free ones are not suitable enough to make an impact and there is a sale or significant discount included.
4. I will test my new knowledge/skill/technique using a test made by an independent party to avoid bias.
5. I will rate the resources I use and give a recommendation on if you should use them or not.

Just to let you know, I do have a few ideas lined up for upcoming posts, including:

• Learning how to crochet
• Learning how to play the ukulele better (my skills need work)
• Touch-typing (I do not employ the best technique at the moment)
• Learning how to code in Python (I have started learning but nothing has actually been developed yet)

That’s all for now, but if you want to keep up with me and my projects, I have all my social media links in the navigation bar at the top of the page. I might post videos on my YouTube channel to show my progress through each project for some extra content. Thanks for reading and have a great day!