Making Routines
As stated in the title, this marks a month to the day since I started writing these blog posts. I haven't missed a day, and although some days may not have been my best material, due to lack of sleep, just the act of making this part of my routine has really added some nice structure to my journey. It would be nice if this blog eventually served its purpose of showing how far I've come and how I did it, but that's the big picture. I couldn't get to that big picture without writing a simple blog post every day.
Today, I was able to make a big push in "Complete React Developer in 2019," by Andrei Neagoie and Yihua Zhang. I started out the day with about a third left of section 8, the Redux section, and now I'm beginning section 15. This puts me just shy of halfway through the class in a period of a week, so I'm making great progress in this course. It is incredibly difficult to keep up with these guys; this class is a bit more advanced than I thought it would be, but I'm hanging on by a thread. I've actually had much less errors overall and have been able to identify them without losing too much hair, which is a huge time-saver. Getting stuck with a missing parentheses or incorrectly exporting can lead to hours of lost time. I think I've cut that time by about 75% in this course, which is awesome. There are still some huge topics to go, so I'm definitely not going to count my chickens before they hatch. In the last section, we went ahead and deployed the app to Heroku, so it's alive and kicking! I really wanted to use Netlify, but I was afraid to deviate too much from the instructors in case there may be something in the future that would throw me for a loop. I've used Heroku before, and I think it's pretty bad compared to Netlify. It works just fine, though, with no real issues with deployment.
As far as the social aspect goes, I made some nice strides today. My mentor seems to have ghosted me, which isn't a great trait for a mentor, but I do understand that he's doing this voluntarily and has a full-time job. I think I may politely part ways with him and explore other options. I've had a great conversation with the first guy I contacted, who unfortunately already has 3 mentees. I plan on keeping in touch with him; I found out last night that he actually is one of the creators of Coding-Coach and works alongside Emma Wedekind on this. I first heard about the app on a podcast that she was a guest on, and she sounds like an awesome person. Really, all of the people in this ecosystem seem very forward-thinking and kind. This isn't the old-boys club world of golf and business; this is an industry led by the brightest and the best, not the most wealthy. That is invigorating, to me. Also, I contacted the moderator of the local React meetup to see if I could get involved in some way, as I saw that they don't really have any events lined up in the future. I haven't heard back from him, but I did contact a guy who's doing a talk on Typescript in October, and he was so cool! He's going to let me take him out for coffee or something and pick his brain about the industry down here in Florida and how to break in. I think he could be a great mentor, and he's local, which is even better! Things are definitely looking up in this department!
Until tomorrow!