Wrapping up the Course

I've been grinding over this course on Youtube all day and all last night, and I have 2 sections left. The course, Create a GatsbyJS Blog, by Classsed, covered some really interesting concepts in Gatsby that I hadn't yet been introduced to, and concepts in React I had never tried. For example, I had never implemented a pagination component before, and I found out, while there is quite a bit of logic behind a fairly small component, it wouldn't be that hard to replicate if I were to take my time and just think it through, especially with the way Gatsby works. The most challenging part about Gatsby so far has been getting the gatsby-node and gatsby-config pages correctly written, and I think this guy handled this really well in this course. In the last Gatsby course I took, I ended up getting stuck on the gatsby-config file for a solid 10 hours over something fairly small; it turned out there were some compatibility issues with a version of a plugin and the version of Node I was using, and it took some digging around to figure it out. So far, the worst problem I had was a typo I made while I was falling asleep that cost me about a half hour to track down.

This project uses a UI component library that I hadn't used for a very long time, Bootstrap, or rather Reactstrap. When first introduced to Bootstrap, I thought it was awesome, but then I started recognizing it in every website I went to and realized it was way overused. After seeing how this site turned out, I'm willing to give it another try. With Reactstrap, it was really simple to implement and looks really slick. Comparing it to Material UI, I think it's much easier to use, but you can't do nearly as much as you can with Material UI. I believe a person could spend a solid month or so going deep on Material UI alone to learn all of the nuances of this component library and they could end up being able to do some really cool things. In fact, maybe I should do that. Regardless, I really liked the way this blog site turned out, I think even more so than how this site turned out. Here's a link to the live site; it will be complete within an hour of publishing this post, but it's fully functional at this point

In the last couple weeks, I've been hitting the job applications really hard, putting out as many as I possibly can. The goal was to land a job before I had to go back to work from my break due to my injury, but I only have a week left, so I think I'm going to miss my chance. However, I have had a few pretty decent leads that have started to come around in the last couple of days. I have some interviews scheduled for next week, and they sound somewhat promising. My goal for the rest of the week and the beginning of next week is to keep hitting it hard; I think my portfolio and resumé are at the point where they are attracting some attention, so I really need to take advantage of that. I've gotten a few interviews under my belt, and I feel like I'm getting better at them, but I still haven't had any technical interviews, which I think would be really helpful. I know I've been doing a whole lot to try and get myself out there, and I've spent a lot of time building up the things I think are important to getting hired. Hopefully, I'll get a good break come my way soon.

Until tomorrow!