Blog Launch Day

Today is the first day I'm writing my blog entry on Contentful instead of Storyblok. It's a different setup, but I can now do things like underline, italicize, link to other pages, make ordered or unordered lists, add line breaks, make block quotes, or even write in html format. It opens up a lot of doors for the capabilities of my blog entries, but the blog site itself is what I'm really proud of. My original blog was a carbon copy of a project followed on Youtube by Maximilian Schwarzmüller, linked here. I would recommend anyone looking to follow in my footsteps in writing a progress blog to either start with that or this Gatsby blog tutorial. The second of these, a tutorial called "The Great Gatsby Bootcamp," by Andrew Mead, was a great resource for learning Gatsby for me, as well as a nice intro to GraphQL and Contentful. This site is loosely based off of that project, but has been modified quite a bit to get it looking like it is now.

The purpose of a blog like this is to document my journey and show how hard I'm working on a daily basis. This is my 131st entry in this blog without missing a single day, and if an employer were to see this and read a few of the entries, they would be able to tell how dedicated I am to making this transition in my career and how passionate I am about this new life I've created. It also serves as a bit of a roadmap for upcoming developers, to see what resources have really helped me and which ones were not as helpful. When I get a job, this will become a journal of how a person can go about learning web development on their own, without the aid of a bootcamp or Computer Science degree. There are plenty of free and close to free resources out there that I really believe a person doesn't have to drop $10,000 or so to get the desired result. It may not be the easiest path, but it's the one I had to choose. Having a family to take care of, I don't have the luxury to quit my job and go off to a bootcamp for 3 months, making no money while shelling out a large sum. I have to take advantage of the late hours of the night to cram, sacrificing sleep and sanity along the way.

On my journey today, I dove into Wes Bos' JavaScript30, a series of tutorials I've been meaning to look into for quite a while. I've always had such a long list of videos to watch on Frontend Masters or Udemy to pay attention to this, but it's finally time. I finished the first 2 days of this 30 day challenge and then decided to deploy them to Netlify, just for the heck of it. Then, I had an idea. What if I made a compilation site using Gatsby of all the projects created in this tutorial, just to show off? It would give me a chance to practice with Gatsby, and it would be a nice thing to add to my portfolio. JavaScript30 is a very recognizable course, and its credibility is highly regarded, so that could be fairly valuable to include. The way I see it, I have 2 options for this site: I could change all of these projects into React components, which would be really difficult and maybe impossible given the amount of DOM manipulation, or I could have a series of cards on one page, each representing a project, and each having an external link to the deployed project. I'm leaning towards the latter right now, but I want to at least try to turn them into React components to see how hard it would really be. At least I have some things I can do, and I'm not sitting here looking through Youtube or Frontend Masters trying to find inspiration for my next move!

Until tomorrow!