Finding lost sleep
On my days off, I always try to take advantage of my daughter's nap time to study. Of late, that nap time has been extended to about 3 hours. Today, though, I got about 20 minutes into my work and realized I was completely cashed out. So, I did what I thought was best and took a nap. Usually when I take a nap, I can only sleep for about 15 minutes, but I went into one of the deepest sleeps I've had in a long time, complete with vivid dreams. I slept for about 2 hours and woke up feeling 100% better. Since May 26th of this year, I've been working with a vigor that I've never had before in my life. In my job, I work over 40 hours a week, and they are hard hours, at least 12 of them being outside in the heat. When I get home, I always try to spend a little time with my family, but by 7, I'm working hard on learning web development. I've been putting in at least 4 hours of studying every night, if not more. I went from going to bed at 9 every night before I started this to staying up until at least 11 every night, and I'm up in the morning by 5:30 pretty much every morning, sometimes before that. I've extended myself as far as I can take it, but I know the payoff will be worth it when I get there. However, there is a limit to my energy, and I may have crossed that line recently. It seems that this nap did the trick.
Last night, I spent quite a bit of time refactoring my Hatchways project-based assessment, and I felt a lot better about it. I resubmitted it and almost immediately after I did so, I heard back from them on my original submission. They gave me some useful critiques, some were positive and others were things I could fix to make it better. Unfortunately, they did not pass me through to the interview stage, but they did approve me for their $2500 bootcamp, which to me sounds incredibly fishy. While there were definitely quite a few things I could have done to make the app better, I was really proud of my end result given the time constraint. I did think it was worthy of passing through this stage of their assessment, but I'm beginning to wonder if they actually pass anyone through, or if everyone gets deferred to their bootcamp. I don't want to sound bitter, but this doesn't seem like a crazy conclusion. I've already dedicated quite a bit of time to this project, so I'm already halfway committed to their system. Because of that, I would be more inclined to enroll in their bootcamp and fork over that money. This doesn't sit right with me at all, but maybe I'm completely wrong and my app just wasn't good enough. Like I said, there were quite a few things I could have improved, but I feel like that's pretty understandable given they want you to complete the project in 24 hours. At the end of the day, I'm happy that I completed the project and got through some spots that I might otherwise have given up on.
In about a half hour, I have my weekly pair programming session with my buddy, Matt Bear in Australia. Every week, I look forward to these sessions a little more. I'm learning so much from doing these, and he's teaching me so many things I didn't know. My JavaScript skills are growing so much faster than they were, and I'm feeling more comfortable with the language daily. I'm also working through problems on CodeWars on my own and am able to them a lot more easily than I used to be able to. The best part about these sessions is the fact that I'm becoming so confident in my technical communication. I used to be afraid to get asked any technical questions in an interview, but now I welcome the challenge. I still may not be able to answer a lot of the advanced questions, but I know I could at least fumble my way through a lot of them. Now I just need to be able to get a technical interview!
Until tomorrow!
