Toughness Meter Increased

After working a full day today, I got down to some work on Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy. Unlike yesterday, where I split up my time in between this course and his JavaScript course, I made a really good push on this course, trying to put this one in the books and focus solely on JavaScript. While I love GraphQL and everything I'm learning in this course, it's not going to be very applicable in my new job, so I feel like it's not where I should be spending my time right now. I don't think it's a waste of time, not in the least. In fact, I think that while I'm immersed in this job, I'm going to have to stay current with the most en vogue technologies to be able to land my next job down the line. I may not be getting professional experience using GraphQL, but I would love to be working with it in the future, along with other technologies I won't be using in my job, like NodeJS or Gatsby. This means that, while I should spend my days focusing on the technologies at work, and some nights as well to make sure I'm learning as much as I can about these technologies, I'll be learning on my own about all of the newest and hottest trends in the job market. When I start to apply for my next job down the line, I want to have a strong array of skills to be able to offer, and the only way to do that is to keep pushing on my own.

In the course, I just finished up a massive section on authentication, which ended up being about 5 hours long and one of the largest sections in the course. It started off being pretty difficult and then progressed from there. It was full of challenges along the way, and while I was able to struggle through the challenges in the first half of this section, the second half seemed to go a bit over my head. I think this was mainly due to the fact I took a few days off from the course to focus on the JavaScript course, and I don't think this helped my cause with this course. Since we were learning so many new concepts in this course, it was important to keep building on that knowledge every day, and when I took that time off from learning it, it became a lot less familiar than it should have been. Nonetheless, I was able to get through the section and my project still works, so that's a plus. We are creating the Prisma interface for working with a blog site, so we created the functionality to be able to create a user, log them in, get a JWT token from that log in, and then use that JWT token to create, update and delete both posts and comments. Without this authentication, anyone could potentially come in and do this to anyone else's posts or comments, or even update or delete a user that isn't themselves. Now that we have authentication, the user must be logged in and dealing with their own posts or comments to be able to make any kind of changes. This took a lot of changes to the code we had already written, and some of these changes ended up being pretty complex. I'm sure with some practice and repetition, though, this would become much easier.

The next section for the course is on pagination and sorting with GraphQL, which is then followed by a deployment section, a testing section, and then a little bit of wrap up. All told, I have about 7 hours left of the course, and I would really like to finish it up by the end of the day Friday, at the latest. By the time I start on Monday, March 9th, I want to have completed his JavaScript course and JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts, which is a great course kind of along the lines of Will Sentance's courses. With these courses fresh in my mind, I will feel a lot more confident in my abilities in JavaScript, and will have these concepts fresh in my mind, ready to apply them to some real world applications. I doubt seriously I will be thrown into the fire right away at the job, and I'm sure there will be a bit of a ramp-up time before I'm plugged into the projects, but I feel as though I'm going to be viewed as someone who is advanced in JavaScript, which I don't necessarily feel that I am. There's one other person on the team who deals with JavaScript, who is the lead for the team, so it's just him and I, as far as the JavaScript code goes. There will be a lot of pressure on me, but I think I will have some good guidance to help me along and get me to a much higher level with a quickness. I would love to be able to walk away from this job feeling as though I'm an expert on JavaScript, as well as React, and maybe some other technologies, as well. My next step after this job has to be a mid to senior level position, and I'm going to work hard to be able to open as many doors as I can.

Until tomorrow!