Redux is Hard

I just finished section 8 of Neil Cummings' "Build an app with React, Redux, and Firestore from scratch" after finishing section 7 late last night, both dealing with Redux. Redux is not a beginner's concept and not one to take lightly. This is my second course that uses Redux with React, so this time was definitely a lot easier to comprehend than the first when all of these ideas were introduced out of thin air. This time, I have a nice basis of what these concepts mean and how they fit together, but it's still so hard. A lot of it ends up being basically a boilerplate for a standard Redux workflow, another pattern. Is everything a pattern in React? It certainly seems that way, which should make it much easier once I get these concepts down, but for now, Redux just makes me feel dumb.

This course is going at a perfect pace and is structured really well. Mr. Cummings does an excellent job at introducing concepts, explaining how they work, breaking down the important ideas associated with it, and then implementing it into our app. The thing I really like for this course is that he went through the trouble of creating a vsCode extension with snippets for all of the Semantic-UI components so that all you have to do is type in the code associated with that snippet and it automatically imports it in, instead of having to go back and forth between the Semantic-UI website and copying and pasting all of these components. At first, I felt like this was cheating and that I'd be missing out on writing all of this code, but in actuality it would just be code I would paste in anyways, and oftentimes this can get messed up in the process of doing so, so it cuts down on errors and wasted time.

I'm still chipping away at building a network, both locally and online. I'm up to 85 followers on Twitter, which is kind of cool, but I'm sure to most people that's not very many at all. I've been as active as I can be on Twitter to follow people and like posts associated with 100 days of code, hopefully giving some people a little extra motivation to keep going. I really haven't been commenting on other people's tweets or anything, so that's something I need to do to step up my game, for sure. I've also been working on beefing up my LinkedIn and am up to about 70 connections from about 30 a couple of weeks ago. Using the Zero To Mastery group, I've been able to connect with some people who will mutually endorse skills, which I think is awesome. I've gotten a bunch of skills endorsed by people and have done the same for them. This definitely adds to the validity of these skills. There's still a lot I'm not doing with LinkedIn that could be incredibly useful, but I'm getting there!

Until tomorrow!