Bushed

After working for about 10 and a half hours today, I'm completely pooped. This week marks 6 weeks since I broke my ankle, which means it's time to start walking on it again. Actually, today is exactly 6 weeks. It feels like just yesterday that everything changed in a split second, and I'm still replaying that moment over and over again in my head, with no help from having to recount to just about everyone I know multiple times a day. This accident resulted in missing work for 4 weeks, not being able to really move around too much, and a lot of pain. I had a lot of time to work on my coding journey, and I was able to take full advantage of that time. While I was off work, I lined up a ton of interviews, one of which led to a job offer, and another still to be determined. I completely re-did my blog site, finished my portfolio, and did a few other odd projects here and there. I took a ton of coursework, and overall I learned a lot. Coming back to work in the last 2 weeks has been really challenging. It's meant that I have to be standing on one leg for the majority of a shift and trying to make an effort to get around on either crutches or a scooter. Since I started trying to walk around this week, my legs are so sore, and I've had a lot of pain in my bad ankle. I'm using crutches to help me walk around, as it's not nearly stable enough to walk around fully on yet. I can take a few steps without crutches, but I can't do much. I go into the doctor on Monday and will get another x-ray; after seeing that and getting the doctor's reassurance, I think I'll feel a lot better about walking on it, but that's to be determined.

Yesterday, we wrapped up our 2nd to last class for Codesmith's CS Prep, covering some odd topics that people are struggling with overall. We mainly focused on higher-order functions like map, reduce, and filter, without spending much time on anything else. These are really difficult to grasp, but I've gotten a lot better with them over the last couple months. They are also really useful in web development, especially when dealing with React; the map HOF is used constantly and reduce is the basis for Redux. After covering these topics for about 45 minutes, we broke out into pair programming, where I got to pair up with a guy who was much more advanced than me. We worked on some incredibly difficult algorithms, and I learned more in this short period of time than I have all of the last 2 weeks. I can't say enough about the value of pair programming; working with someone on a different level than you are, either better or worse, helps with technical communication and solidifying the really difficult topics so much. This guy taught me some things I was really struggling with, and by the end I felt like I had a much better handle on these concepts. Overall, I think I would highly recommend this course to anyone looking to get introduced to the Codesmith way, which I believe is a great path to cracking the coding interview and landing an awesome JavaScript developer job.

Today, since I'm on the brink of passing out at any minute, I've been taking it fairly easy by getting back into my course by Colt Steele and Stephen Grider, The New JavaScript Bootcamp. I wouldn't say I'm taking it completely easy, but compared to the intensive learning I've been doing in the last week and a half, this feels like a breeze. I love doing deep dives on JavaScript and feel better about the language every time I do it, but there's nothing more fun than creating a cool project, be it in vanilla JavaScript, React, or whatever. In the second half of this course, we go through project after project, ramping up to a very large e-commerce project built entirely in vanilla JavaScript. Sometimes, when building projects in tutorials, it can become an act of just following along with whatever the instructor is typing, without actually learning anything. Stephen Grider avoids this beautifully by going into depth on all of the concepts he introduces, taking 3 or 4 times as long to go through a code base than many other instructors would just breeze right through. Today, we made a command line tool that mimics the command "ls," where you print out the different files and folders in a directory, but we did it with NodeJS. While it was very simple, and the code was less than 30 lines long, it was really intuitive and, as I've said with his other projects, I feel like I could implement it or something similar on my own with ease.

Until tomorrow!