Working through a large, differently structured project such as making a book has taught me a lot. Not only am I learning more about the creative process that all writers have to go through, but I’m also learning more about a part of my professional appearance that I never got from twelve years of school: maintaining an online presence takes a huge amount of effort. The Unintentional Calamity Project has an online presence, but this is only part of my professional image that I want portrayed online.

The Online Compendium

The structure I have built up for this book is very public. Everything I am doing will be published on my own portfolio site, my GitBook page, or seaofbook.com. While I don’t have regrets about this decision, I do find it hard to motivate myself to devote more time to all three facets. The Unintentional Calamity Compendium is my main focus as it directly relates to what I will be using for future writing. Maintaining this is easier as I know I need to write. Even with writer’s block and forcing creativity, I still find this job easier to focus on because the goal is very clear. I want to make a book. That goal will not be reached without this compendium. Therefore, I have to do the work. The other websites aren’t so directly correlated.

The Portfolio Website

One of my biggest struggles as a professional is making a portfolio website. Obviously there are many services out there that could make my life much easier. While this would be sensible, much of my front-end web development skills have been cultivated by remaking my portfolio website. Ironically, the only LinkedIn test I was able to pass the first try was the CSS test. Although I have had almost no formal training in this area, I have been able to learn a lot by simply trying to make my own portfolio website look good and load efficiently.

There is also a part of me that feels someone with a Data Science major and Computer Science minor should be able to make their own website. Some of this logic probably extends from my friend and mentor Matt Fortier who actually experienced a lot of the same struggles I have experienced. He spent the majority of his college career at Champlain College also trying to develop his own portfolio website. It felt like every couple of months I would look at his website and it would be completely restyled with an improved UI showcasing his new skills he acquired. Somehow I naturally followed his footsteps always trying to improve on skills that didn’t meet my expectations.

As of this post, I have continued to develop my skills as the portfolio website looks drastically different than it did before. Giving my portfolio website a restyling helped build my confidence as a professional. I now feel much more comfortable with the color design and improvements to navigation. I also learned a lot more about linear gradients giving my website a responsive background. Now that these improvements have been implemented, I feel much better about showing off my progress as a web developer as well as my side projects.

Sea of Book

Last summer I had wanted to make a place on the web to publish my own creative writing. Within nine hours, I was able to make Sea of Book from scratch. It was a responsive website that didn’t use any media queries. I was quite proud of the final product. I finally had a place to post creative fiction that I would occasionally write in my free time. Even though I was going into senior year and I knew I wouldn’t have the time to regularly upload a story, at least this website would exist after I graduated. Little did I know, this would be the website that would house the chapters I have yet to write for the Unintentional Calamity. I guess it all worked out in the end.

Making this website did help me realize one thing: maintaining and uploading stories on a regular basis was going to take a lot of time. If I wanted to make a website that might actually promote consistent viewership, I obviously needed to be consistent as well as interesting. Yet another facet to add to an ever growing project.

Prioritizing Time

At the end of the day, what I need to right now do is prioritize my tasks. While I do have Sea of Book for a public writing space, my portfolio for professional development, and a book to write, my main goal is writing the book. Rather than spreading myself thin and changing my work ethic in an unrealistic way, I have decided to put my main focus on the compendium, and slowly expand how much work I can do. People are never good with huge amounts of change all at once, but spreading that change out over a long amount of time is a realistic possibility and one that I plan to follow.