Coming up for air

I've been on the grind with vanilla JavaScript for weeks now, often taking short breaks to work on other technologies. This helps to avoid any type of burnout that might come along with working as hard as I have been. After finishing Will Sentance's "JavaScript: The New Hard Parts" on Frontend Masters, I started to look around for what I should tackle next. I was tempted to try Kyle Simpson's course that I've been working on periodically again, but I'm still intimidated by this advanced course. I think there are still some intermediate steps left before I can get to that. So, I looked on Frontend Masters' most popular courses, and it's no surprise that a React course would be at the top of the list, right behind that aforementioned Kyle Simpson course.

Brian Holt's "The Complete Intro to React" is about 5 hours long, and it seems to be covering the basics of React. Most of the material covered so far, I'm fairly comfortable with, but have never really delved deep into the inner workings of setting up a React project from scratch. Almost every course I've taken on React so far relies heavily on Create-React-App to build out the boilerplate stuff necessary for any React app. Brian is taking us through exactly how to do it without CRA using Parcel as a bundler. This is very interesting, and a lot simpler than I actually thought. He has a follow-up course called "Intermediate React," which I plan on doing directly after this one, while it's fresh in my brain. This will give me some time to find my next JavaScript mountain to climb.

Tonight, I'm hopping on Zoom with a guy from Australia to do a pair programming session. I've never done anything like this before, and honestly, I'm a bit intimidated. This guy is definitely ahead of me as far as what he knows about JavaScript and I don't want to end up looking like an idiot. I know he's going to be able to solve the problem set I've chosen with a lot more ease than I can, but hopefully I can contribute in some way. Otherwise, I think this is going to be a great learning experience for me. I think, between the two of us, we should be able to work on our technical communication and I'll hopefully be able to get my hands dirty with some exercises that were previously unattainable. According to Will Sentance, pair programming is the best way to learn. Instead of going out and researching for hours while not focusing on the exercise at hand, or perhaps just copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, we should both be able to get a lot more out of talking through the problem and explaining our own inputs. While I'm a bit nervous, I think this will overall be a really good experience.

Until tomorrow!