Almost there

Today, I worked 13 hours outside and came home completely exhausted. I still made time to complete the asynchronous JavaScript section of Andrei Neagoie's "Advanced JavaScript Concepts," but just barely. I was basically falling asleep the entire time, but I made it and hopefully retained quite a bit. I've worked with asynchronous code quite a bit in React, but now I feel like I have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Still, at the end of the day, this course is not getting me all the way there with JavaScript. I'm nowhere close to feeling proficient with this language.

My goal was to start Frontend Masters by the end of the week, and I think I'm going to make it. I have about 20% left in Andrei's course, and then I'm moving on. There are more than a few courses on JavaScript in the Frontend Masters curriculum taught by some ridiculously good instructors, including Kyle Simpson, the author of "You Don't Know JavaScript," possibly the most pivotal piece of literature for JavaScript. I'm really looking forward to learning from these legends, but before I get going on JavaScript, there are a few courses on the fundamentals of web development that I'll complete first. A lot of this material will be incredibly easy for me, but it will act as an affirmation of what I've learned so far and as a refresher. There are things in HTML and CSS, as basic as they are, that I still need more practice and understanding in. I didn't spend a lot of time with these concepts initially before rushing into JavaScript, and I'm sure there are many things that I didn't fully grasp.

Frontend Masters also has quite a few courses on CSS, which is much more complex than I initially thought and such a huge part of web development. There have been multiple times that I've tried to manipulate the screen by changing the CSS and have been completely unsuccessful. I definitely need more work on the fundamentals, but I want to go further down the rabbit hole with CSS. There are a lot of intricacies to this language that can allow you to do some really cool things, such as animation. I've worked a little bit with Sass, but this is huge right now and I need to be fully proficient for most jobs. I think these courses will be challenging, but a lot of fun. Once I get past the fundamentals in Frontend Masters, there are going to be some really difficult courses, but I think I'm in good hands with these instructors.

Until tomorrow!