Thanksgiving Coding

We are just about to sit down and eat our big Thanksgiving dinner, so I figured I would get this out of the way before I go into a full food coma. It's been a nice day with my parents in town, hanging out with my little girl; my fiancé had to work during the day, but she's off now, too. I've been working up a good hunger all day, so I'm very excited to eat all of the staples. My mom makes the best stuffing I've had anywhere, plus we have mashed potatoes, this really awesome broccoli slaw, the best sweet potato pie you'll ever have in your life, and, of course, turkey. There's only 4 and a half of us, but we have enough food for a family of fifteen. The best part of Thanksgiving dinner are turkey sandwiches in the ensuing days, and we should be good on those through the weekend. While I've had some misfortune with breaking my leg in the last month, I have a lot to be thankful for. Everyone in my family is in good health, and the future is bright for us. Once I land my first job, life should become a lot more manageable than it has been for us. This time next year should look a lot different than it does now.

Today, I spent quite a bit of time finishing up a course by Classsed on Youtube, building out the front end for the backend I built in his other series I talked about yesterday. This app, which is deployed and live here, turned out really nice. It's a full stack app using MongoDB, Express, React, Node, GraphQL and Apollo. It's built completely with hooks and no class components. The app allows a user to register and login, create posts, delete posts, comment on posts, and like posts. There may be some features I would like to add to it, like lazy loading or pagination, but since it's just a demonstration of a full stack app with CRUD features, I'm pretty satisfied with it as is. I've been on a kick of watching Classsed's tutorials in the last week. I have to say, I'm really impressed with his courses. I had a few issues with some destructuring things he did on the front end for this course, but beyond that, everything was really well explained and worked really well. For whatever reason, I was having some difficulties in a few spots with the code he wrote, and I wasn't alone. I did a little research and found other people that had gotten stuck in the same spots; it wasn't long before I found a solution to the issues. I was able to deploy the back end to Heroku and the front end to Netlify within about 30 minutes, which is really impressive for a full stack app like this. It's inevitable for something like this to get bogged down in deployment bugs, but I really had no issues, thanks to his explanation. Overall, his courses have been a really good and educational experience.

Now, it's time for some hooks practice. Classsed has another series where he covers all the main hooks in React and goes into them in depth. I'm nearly finished with this, as well, and then I'll have to do some searching for my next move. Brad Traversy has a great looking video on Redux which I would really like to watch and learn some more about Redux. It seems like, as many tutorials as I've watched about Redux, I'm still not getting it. I know this is a complex topic and a lot of people have trouble with it, but if I can master it, it would be very beneficial for me as a React developer. So many jobs I've applied for ask for experience with Redux, and if I could get really good at it, I would have a huge advantage. I'm really getting into some advanced topics of React and feeling very comfortable with the library in its fundamental and intermediate topics. State management still remains something I need to work on and understand to a greater extent, but I'm learning and growing in this area, as well. Overall, I'm very happy with my progress in React world. In about a week, I'll be diving deep into JavaScript on its own in Codesmith's 2 week CSPrep program, so I will be completely switching gears.

Until tomorrow!