This post is part of an ongoing series in which I document my journey through the COVID-19 quarantine. See Day 1 for full context.

Quick update

I made a lot of progress on logo-quiz, finally deployed a working version! It’s been almost a year since I first started working on this idea and I’m happy to see it materialized. It’s a very beta version, with a hundred bugs, but it’s pretty functional.

I also started doing with brain warmups. This is a concept I developed to get my brain warmed up before diving into real qork. I thought about it based on the following 3 arguments:

1. I have a very bad habit of not jumping right on the important tasks when turning on my laptop. I wander on Twitter, Dev, YouTube, news, etc, until I finally hit my zone. This is a huge waste of brain power.

2. You don’t eliminate a bad habit. You replace it with a good one.

3. The brain is a muscle. Therefore, it needs warm up or else it will show resistance to embrace sudden hard work.

I outlined a series of simple, short brain warm-up exercises to build momentum and jump right into action. Simple algorithms, quick routines, basic math puzzles, short frontend/backend challenges, etc. It can also be done on a notebook (physical) but it’s better if it’s on the laptop.

This was my first day and it worked wonders. Let’s see how this new experiment goes.

Brain warm-up exercises

• Write some code on paper
• Open repl.it. Code an easy algorithm from Leetcode.
• Write a few lines of an open source project
• Only warm up with technologies similar to those that you will work on in the day
• Code vomit an idea, just code without googling stuff
• Visualize and write down the first minutes of the day
• Don’t stretch too much. It’s not meant to be difficult, just build momentum.
• Spend no more than 10 mins warming up.
• Do more than 1 warming in the day, if necessary.
• Combine between paper and typing.