Musashi might be the best novel I’ve ever read. I’m not even half way through it yet, but the book is amazing. The way that Takezo grows into Musashi and wills himself into his best possible self is inspiring. Musashi’s relentless, singular focus on becoming the best samurai in Japan consumes his entire being. The book is filled with adventure, action, and philosophical gems so far. I could not recommend reading it more.

I finished a quick Pluralsight course called Play-by-Play: Crafting a Brand for Growth and Prosperity. It was quick discussion featuring Troy Hunt and Lars Klint. The course authors shared their insights on how to build a personal brand as a software developer. Since the authors have built great personal brands theirselves, the course had a lot of interesting pointers and was a good way to spend an hour. Dev-eryday and being active on GitHub has me on the right track!

With Major League Baseball starting up this week, there was a lot of distractions this week. I didn’t read or work through as much content as I’d like to have. It’s no problem though, because I still made a solid amount of progress on learning and creating.

Finished

PluralSight Course(s): Play-by-Play: Crafting a Brand for Growth and Prosperity

Currents

MOOC Course: Mastering the Software Engineering Interview

PluralSight Course(s): Implementing and Securing an API with ASP.NET Core, Building a RESTful API with ASP.NET Core, Getting Started with .NET Core on Mac and Linux, React.js: Getting Started, Getting Started with Phoenix

Book(s): Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

On the Next…

I spent some quality time on Wednesday and Thursday building a tool to parse out the daily IdeaListz I write (IdeaListParser). The tool is a .NET Core console application that reads in a text file of IdeaListz in the special format I’ve used. It was a lot of fun to get the text into a more usable format. Going through the process to convert the current format into code objects has me really wanting the IdeaListz site to get up and running. Hopefully I’ll start working on that a little bit this week.