The Waiting is the Hardest Part

On Monday, I had what felt like a really big interview with a company based out of Austin, Texas for a front end developer job. They informed me in this interview that I was one of 4 applicants left out of 60 initial applicants. I thought I did pretty well conveying my passion for development and telling my story, but it's hard to tell in situations like that how well I really did. If the other applicants have more experience than I do, then there's only so much I can do, but I hope that I expressed my ability to exceed the price they would pay to hire me. In the interview, they were kind enough to give me a timeline of events going forward. They let me know it would take about a week and a half to make a decision, and then they would ask me to come out to the site in Austin to spend a couple days meeting everyone on the team. So, I don't expect them to call me, if they do at all, until at least the middle of next week, but in my mind they could call at any point. I knew they wouldn't be calling for sure yesterday or the day before, being holidays, but they could have called today or tomorrow, for sure. Again, I seriously doubt they will call until the middle of next week, but I have a really difficult time with anticipation like this. It's hard for my mind not to drift constantly to this prospect and the thought of hearing the good news.

After finishing up with my day, I got to work on my studies. I'm back at it with Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New JavaScript Bootcamp. I'm finally at about 85% completion of the course and only have about 3 and a half sections of the course left. The main project of the course will wrap up either in the next section or the one following that, so I'm within a few hours of closing in on this project. We are building an e-commerce app without the help of any kind of framework, complete with sign-up functionality and the ability for an admin to add, change or delete products from the page. Today, I've been working on adding all of the functionality to the products part of this, and adding images with the product has proven to be a lot more involved than I thought it would be. It involves quite a few steps to be able to read an image from an upload, but the skills I'm gaining in doing this will travel well. I've done some really similar projects in React, and it's a breeze compared to this, but just as involved. With React, though, it just ends up being a lot cleaner to work with when you have so many different tools at your disposal to make things work. Part of the purpose of this course is to be able to do everything you can do with React, without the use of a framework. While I may not end up using these skills directly, understanding how these functionalities work under the hood is so important, and I'm feeling really good about that.

I've been pair programming since back in October with a guy named Matt, who I met on Twitter through the #100DaysOfCode challenge. He reached out to me after reading my blogs and showed some interest in my progress. I checked him out and realized he was well beyond where I was, and we got to talking. After a few conversations back and forth, I felt as though he was a great mentor for me, and he asked if I would be interested in doing some pair programming. He really helped me out a lot in understanding what I'm doing in JavaScript, and I can't thank him enough for that. He also helped me out in some other random spots, like with a project I was really struggling with for a coding test. I met a guy in my cohort for Codesmith's CS Prep, which I just wrapped up this last week, and we hit it off. During the 2 week course, we spent a night doing some pair programming and then ended up on the same team for the final project. He's only been coding for about a month, but his skills are really impressive. He thinks I'm way ahead of him with JavaScript, but I don't think that's as true as he does. We've decided to do another pair programming session tonight in about 10 minutes, and I'm hoping it ends up being a weekly session. I've talked about it quite a few times, but I believe pair programming is the secret sauce to really advance your skills. He might think I'm well ahead of him, but I'm going to get as much, if not more, out of this session as he does.

Until tomorrow!