The Grind

After a 3 day weekend, it was more than difficult to go back to work today. Thankfully, it was a fairly uneventful day, and the mood was pretty relaxed. As we have been for about 2 months now, my cohort and I continued our work on our React Native project. As per usual, I'm not getting the information I need to be as productive as I can be, but I'm making the most of my time. I'm also actively trying to communicate the fact that I'm not getting what I need, but it doesn't seem to have the desired effect. In a department like this, there are 2 basic structures of organization: hierarchical or flat. A hierarchical structure will have senior developers delegating work to junior developers and composing the architecture of applications, creating tasks for the people under them and pair programming with them to bring them up to their level. In a flat organizational structure, everyone is on the same level and there are no leaders. While in the latter structure, there can be some positives, like a more cohesive team, I think it leads to more problems than the solutions it creates. My preference would be to work in a hierarchical structure and be mentored by someone to bring my skills to a higher level, but unfortunately that's not my situation.

Most of the time, I answer to my peer, my cohort. He is a bit younger than I am, and by a bit, he is 12 years younger, but that makes no difference to me. He's been with the company for over a year and has been studying software development much longer than I have. I think he's been focusing on JavaScript and React 2 or 3 years, so not a lot longer than I have, but enough to where I feel like he has much more experience than I do. If I were to rate my skills against his when I first started about 4 months ago, we were miles apart. I still think he is much farther along than I am, but I've closed that gap by quite a bit. I sometimes look at his code and am amazed by what he puts out. It seems out of reach, but if I keep going, I'll be there sooner than I think. It seems that he is in the process of graduating from junior or mid-level status, to being a senior developer, able to architect enterprise-level applications from scratch, which is in fact what he's done in the case of our current project. He's now working on a library of components that will be used across other applications and will serve many purposes going forward. These are not unattainable tasks for me, but they would stretch my skills to the limit.

I'm just getting ready to get my daughter down for the night and get back to work on my personal studies. If you've read my blog the past few days, you'll know I've switched gears in my studies to focus on a new frontier: Python. At times, I feel like this is a bad decision when I still have so much to learn in the world of JavaScript. When I think of some of the great minds in the world of JavaScript, they probably only know JavaScript and that hasn't hurt them. You can go so deep with one language and there's nothing wrong with focusing on one language. At the same time, I needed a shot of motivation to get myself going, and sometimes it's best to take on another mountain. It is a goal of mine to learn multiple languages in the world of programming, and I think, for me at least, JavaScript and now Python are only the beginning. As I'm learning, the fundamentals are always the same or very similar. The rules and syntax are different, but that's about it. The fact of the matter is, learning Python will open up new doors of possibility for me and will also open up all kinds of new things to learn and possibly new opportunities. So far, I'm enjoying it.

Until tomorrow!