Trying to keep the pace
Well, I've made it through the first 6 sections of Andrei Neagoie's "Complete React Developer in 2019," and I'm doing alright with it so far. These guys move really fast, though. Andrei doesn't do a lot of the teaching in this course, it seems; he kind of pops in every 4 or 5 lessons to clarify something that Yihua Zhang has gone over in a previous lesson. Yihua has done all of the actual coding, so far. He moves incredibly fast. I was just working on Section 6, which was supposed to only be a 1 hour section; it took me about 2 and a half hours to finish this section just because I was having to stop the video about every 30 seconds to catch up. I'm not running into a lot of errors, which I think means that I'm starting to understand the syntax a lot better. Before, the majority of my time was spent trying to figure out where I missed a parentheses or quotation. Now, I may get those issues, but I find them really quickly. I'm slowly becoming a lot more efficient in how I write code.
If I had decided to take this course before taking Colt Steele's React course, I don't think I would have been able to handle it. It's not that these guys don't explain everything well; they really do. The issue is that they are cramming 2 or 3 hours worth of material into an hour. The amount of progress that we've made in the final project through 3 sections alone is incredible. We've almost laid out the entirety of the website without adding any other packages or tools, like Redux, Stripe, Firebase, Apollo and GraphQL. I feel like I'm getting about 100 hours of material in this 40 hour course, which is good and bad. Also, another thing that bothers me is that instead of going through the styling for each page, these guys skipped that completely to focus solely on React and just tossed us the stylesheets for insertion. I actually enjoy taking the time to go through the styling of the app, so this is a bit of a disappointment. Not to mention, they are using Sass instead of CSS, which I haven't used yet. I would have loved to learn more about Sass and become proficient in it, but that's not really an option in this course. It is very similar to CSS and I understand the syntax immediately; I just would have liked it a lot better if they had added a few more hours onto the class and go through each stylesheet line by line to help ingrain the concepts. No matter, I can always take a Sass course to hone these skills; I actually already have one picked out when I can find the time to take it.
Speaking of time, mine was limited today due to work and an upcoming tournament tomorrow. I worked all day until 5:30 and wasn't able to sit down to study until 7:45. It's about 10:10 now and I'm low on energy. The next section will be on a brand new technology to me: Firebase. I would like to be a bit more refreshed to tackle this section, but I may at least try to watch the first couple of videos if they are introductory style. If they jump right into code, I don't think I can handle it at this point. On another note, I looked ahead to the end of the course to find a bonus section on creating a blog in Gatsby. I'm looking forward to tackling this section; I'm considering migrating this blog to another site whenever possible. There a lot of things I wish I could do with this blog, but since I wrote it in Vue, it would take me a long time to try and figure out how to mess around with it. Hopefully, that turns out well when I get to it.
Until tomorrow!
