Fun Stuff

I've been spending the last week going deeper with Gatsby and I've learned a ton. I feel much more comfortable with Gatsby than I did, and I feel comfortable enough with GraphQL to be able to use with Gatsby. You can get a lot more complicated with GraphQL than I have, but with Gatsby, you really don't need to use it to the full extent it can be used. There is an entire ecosystem of plugins and themes involved with Gatsby that I need to explore, and it seems like the best way to do this is through Jason Lengstorf's videos. I don't know if he's still doing it, but there was a time where he came out with a video at least once a week where he would live code with a guest who was an expert on a certain subject.

So far, I've watched a few videos of his, one that was on hooks in React and Gatsby, one on using Contentful, one on using D3 within Gatsby, and then last night I watched one on React-Spring and React-Three-Fiber. The one on hooks completely changed everything for me, and I started being able to use hooks with confidence after this. The way it was explained in that tutorial was absolutely perfect. The video on Contentful was really good, and I learned a few tricks about using that specific plugin. I watched the D3 video last night with Swizec Teller, and it was really informative. D3 is incredibly complicated, notoriously so, but you can do some really cool things with it. It doesn't exactly work too well with Gatsby, though. I finished up the video on animating this morning, and this was by far the coolest one to do. The end product was taking a 3D model from an external source and being able to manipulate it with your cursor. React-Three-Fiber and React-Spring can be used with hooks, so the codebase is actually really succinct and wouldn't be the hardest thing in the world to implement on your own. I think it would be really cool to watch another tutorial or two with this specific technology and then implement it in some way in a personal project, maybe adding something to the homepage of my tutorial to grab the viewer's attention. I'm not sure what I'm going to watch next, but I would like to continue with Jason's tutorials.

I spent a good portion of the day today applying for jobs. I started off going through a website I came across a long time ago called apprenticeships.me and applied for a handful of jobs through this platform. Then, I went to a list of remote-friendly companies I found on Github a long time ago and just started going through the list. I must have applied or sent off emails to 25 companies, but I only made it halfway through the C's in the list. So, in the next few days, I have a few things I would like to get done. I would love to get through that list and apply to as many of these jobs as I can, hopefully getting some kind of response. I need to finish migrating all of my blog posts to my new site; I moved 25 more this morning, so I'm up to 50 on the new site, only 79 to go. Finally, I would like to keep learning more about Gatsby and the surrounding ecosystem as well as some of the advanced React topics I don't know too well, yet. There's always plenty to do!

Until tomorrow!