Another Landmark

It's been a crazy year, looking back at it. I'm not talking about the events that have transpired over the last 3 months in the world, including Australia's bushfires, the threat of war with Iran, Coronavirus, and Kobe's death, but of my own selfish accomplishments. I started this journey of learning to code on May 26th of 2019, 297 days ago from today. Every single day since then, I've spent countless hours studying and doing my best to learn as much as I can, in hopes of changing the path of mine and my family's lives. If I stop and think about it for a second, that's really an amazing feat. There have been a lot of days where I was completely beat after working 12 to 14 hours out in the sun, but I still came home and put a couple hours at least of studying in. There were days where I was battling a cold, but I still spent my free time working. I broke my ankle, and doubled down on my efforts, studying almost the entire day, every day while I was home with the broken leg. I started this blog on July 16th of last year, which is 246 days ago, and have written an entry every single day since then to document my experience and to keep a record of where I've been and how far I've come. I haven't really gone back to read any of the old entries I had, but maybe someday I will. 246 days of writing without missing a day is a crazy feat, though.

Shortly after I started writing my blog, I started doing the 100 days of code challenge on Twitter. Today marks the finish of the second round of this, and I again haven't missed a day since I started this challenge, 200 days straight. If anything, I've shown to future employers I have the ability to persevere and continue onward. Since starting this challenge, I've met all kinds of people on Twitter that are walking similar paths that I have and am walking right now, from all over the world. Some are less fortunate than me, and struggle with internet connection or having access to a computer. While I'm certainly not well off, far from it, there are a lot of comforts I take for granted that have made this journey easier for me than it would be for others. In some countries, jobs for software developers don't pay very well, and these people are trying desperately to make it to the US or to Europe where they can be paid appropriately for their skills. At least in the US, though, companies are much less willing to hire someone who is not a US citizen due to having to sponsor their visa, so it's really an uphill battle for them to break through and gain proper employment. It was really difficult for me to find a job as a software developer even as a US citizen, and I can't imagine how difficult it must be for them to break through and find that first job. Tomorrow, I have to make the decision on whether I will continue on with the challenge, or hang it up. I don't think there's any reason why I won't continue.

Today was another successful day on the job, building on the skills I've acquired so far and becoming more and more efficient with React, in particular. I have my feature that I've been building, a portal for payment that walks the customer through various steps and several forms, all hooked up and ready to go; now it's just down to getting it connected to the API and passing the data through. I shouldn't say that's all it's down to; in the morning, I'll be working on some styling changes that have been mapped out for me. My helpful neighbor drew up a diagram on Figma for me to follow that takes me through exactly how each page should look, and I'll have to spend quite a bit of time making these changes. I've already completed the first 3 pages or so, but the real challenge is going to be the last one, which I finished the functionality for today. On this page, I map out an array into cards that each hold the information for referrals from this customer, including their name, email, and phone number. Ideally, it will only show the name of the referral, and then when you hit a little button, it will expand the card with the email address and phone number, along with buttons to edit and remove the referral. This will take a little bit of tweaking to get it to work, and I think I'm going to have to use some state to set up whether or not the expanded card is showing, but I'm certain I can figure it out. From there, it's on to the final touches, and I should be able to wrap this project up soon.

Until tomorrow!