Project Fun

My usual routine for learning outside of work is to focus on coursework, mostly from Udemy. I'm up to almost 700 hours of coursework consumed, which I think is an awesome statistic to have attached to my name. To me, this is a great substitute when you may not have been classically trained with a degree in computer science or if you haven't gone to a bootcamp. Even if you do meet those aforementioned requirements, it shows you are willing to continue learning and growing as a developer. In this industry, I think one of the most important traits of a good developer is a desire to learn and the knowledge that being a developer means you have to continue learning your entire career. If you were a doctor and you stopped learning once you left school, in 20 years most of what you had learned would be antiquated and some of it no longer relevant at all. If you were a lawyer, you would have to stay on top of new laws and changing laws. In some professions, what you learn in school is all you will ever need to know, but the more I think about it, the less I can come up with. It's the people who continue to stay on top of what's relevant that continue to grow and progress in their careers.

Even businesses need to understand that. There is code we have in our codebase at work that is completely outdated. In some job postings, I can see they are looking for developers using jQuery and other technologies that are no longer widely used. These technologies are not as efficient as today's tools and a lot of them are not very fun to work with. Luckily, my company is progressive enough to embrace new tools and technologies like React and React Native and give us the freedom to choose the tools that will allow us to do our best job. I can't imagine having to work with stuff I won't find useful in future jobs and that's difficult to find updated documentation on. I would be happy to learn the tools and technologies that I'm using on the job if that were the case, but I'm much happier being able to work with React and React Native. This means that, while I'm at this job, I'm getting the most relevant experience for future positions and I don't have to think that I'm wasting my time gaining experience in areas that won't help me prosper.

In the last week, instead of taking my usual coursework, I've been working on a personal project. I'm using an API that just calls a JSON object of information about superheroes. On my home screen, I have that information show up as a list of cards with the image of the superhero and their name. Each card is clickable and will take the user to a page devoted to that superhero. On that individual superhero page, I have more details about the hero, along with their image again. I also created a status bar for each of their powerstats, which shows up as a column of powerstats. I've been working on the styling, and I think I finally got it to look pretty good. I'm still not happy with the individual hero page, but I'll keep tweaking it until I like the looks of it. Today, I built out the search bar for the home page that sits in the navigation bar. I used a reducer to handle the search changes, and it works really well. If no results are found for the query, an H1 is returned telling the user no results are found. From here, I have 2 main things I would like to accomplish this weekend. I would like to get the individual hero page looking good, and I want to work out how I'm going to filter the information. For example, I want the user to be able to show only heroes with no villains, or vice versa. I want them to be able to show only Marvel heroes, or DC heroes, or whatever the publisher might be. Functionally, I know how this is going to work, but I haven't decided on the UI yet. It's coming together, though.

Until tomorrow!