Birthday Celebrations

Since I started working this job, I've only had one 3 day weekend. It's been a bit of a grind, and the pace has been pretty fast-going. Looking back on all I've learned over the past 4 months, it's pretty amazing. When I first started my job, I knew React pretty decently, but I had my troubles. I understood the basics and could even use some of the hooks to a certain extent. One of my first tasks was building a payments application for customers to pay for their plans. The application consisted of multiple pages of forms with all kinds of different possible states. I really struggled with creating forms and passing that data around, but I learned quickly. At first, we were just creating forms from scratch without using any kind of libraries to help out. It was good to learn this way, but the amount of re-renders was enormous. We implemented React-Hook-Forms after a little while and things got a lot better. Over time, I learned how to create reducers and get them to work with context. Given how much I've struggled with Redux, it was a huge accomplishment to be able to manage state in this way.

Before I started this job, I had never used TypeScript at all. Actually, that's not entirely true; in one course I took, about an hour of it consisted of TypeScript, which basically no basis in the superscript at all. Within the first week, I worked with my cohort to convert our payments application into a TypeScript application. Ever since then, it's all I use. I even created my own project all in TypeScript a couple weeks ago. There are still some really complex concepts in TypeScript I'm not comfortable with, but these rarely come up in React. When you start getting into creating your own reusable, composable components, these concepts can become a little more important, but for now, my level of knowledge is proficient. We busted out 2 versions of this application and then moved on to working on a React Native application. This has been our main focus for nearly 2 months now. I've worked with React Native before, but the learning curve for this was pretty extreme. I feel pretty comfortable with it now, but it's been an uphill climb. I'm trying to bone up on my design skills so I can be a little more useful, but given where I've come from, my experience level is rising quickly.

To my original point, I'm taking a day off tomorrow, giving me a 3-day weekend. It's my daughter's second birthday tomorrow, and we want to make it as memorable as possible. I'm not much for spoiling a kid, but my fiancé has gone well beyond the normal amount of preparation for a kid's birthday, and this is certainly one she'll remember, if she can remember at this young of an age. I have 2 3-day weekends in a row, and I'm really looking forward to getting caught up on some rest. I always try to stay busy and get as much as I can done on my own on the weekends, but I'm also going to be doing a fair bit of relaxing and hanging out with the family. My goal is to make it to the pool all three days, so that would be a mark of a good weekend. Because of the pandemic, we won't be going out anywhere, but we can have plenty of fun at the pool and around the house. We may go out to a park somewhere where we can get away from some people, but we'll see how it pans out. As far as my work goes, I'm completely redesigning my progress blog, and it's looking really good. I've decided to take a simpler route with it and take out a lot of the fluff. After reviewing designs for several hours, I've realized I have way too many containers. I'm hoping to get this rolled out by the end of the weekend, hopefully I can get it done.

Until tomorrow!