Close to the End

On my day off today, I spent most of my time hanging out with my little girl. Typically, while she takes her nap, I try to get some work done and often take a good nap myself. I was able to get about an hour and a half of work in, but then she woke up. This was unusual, as she has been taking 3 to 4 hour naps lately, which has been awesome. Not that I don't enjoy spending time with her, but it's nice to have a little time to myself during the day and get some work done instead of always having to get my work done at the end of the night. Of course, all of that is about to change when I start my new job. I'll be spending 8 hours every day during the week coding or doing code-related activities and working with a team of more advanced developers who can teach me everything they know. I've said it before, but my learning curve is about to go parabolic. It's going to be really fun to see how much I progress in a short time frame, but I suspect at the same time, it's going to be really challenging. I will likely feel really overwhelmed from time to time, but I know in a year's time, my confidence levels with coding will be through the roof and I will know 100 times what I know now. Not to mention, the amount I will be able to learn in a job will be 100 times more than what I can learn on my own. It's going to be difficult, but it will be awesome.

It's back to work tomorrow, with 8 more days of actual work left before I leave that job. I told them I would stay through our craziest tournament of the year, the member-guest invitational. This is a four-day event where 48 members bring a guest, drink all day, and play two nine-hole matches every day. We get there at 6 in the morning and don't leave until after nightfall. This coming week will be the hardest week we work all year, and it will be difficult to get through, but I would feel awful leaving them hanging during this week. We just had another one of our professionals quit last week, so it's down to just 4 of us running the show. It will be difficult enough with us being as short-staffed as we are; if I left before this tournament happened, they would be completely screwed. After the tournament, there are still a solid 2 months left of the season, but the majority of the tournament season is done. There are a spattering of events coming up past the member-guest, but everything will pale in comparison to the big one, and they will be fine. I feel a little guilty leaving with some of the season left to go, but I have to what is right for my family and I. I've told a few of the members at the club that I'm leaving, and they're all sad to see me go, but supportive that I'm doing something that's more fulfilling for me. Word will start to seep out, and by the time of the big tournament, everyone will know. There's a big dinner next Friday, and I'm hoping to get some nice closure from this.

Today, I worked strictly on Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy. I'm trying to make the final push on this course so I can work solely on some JavaScript courses and be in a good mental state for my first day. I've loved this GraphQL course and have learned so much. Andrew is now one of my top 3 favorite teachers, and I think he's right behind Will Sentance now for me in the 2 spot. Stephen Grider had moved up to that 2 spot until this course, but I think Andrew is much clearer in his applications and I love the challenges provided in his courses. Without these challenges, all these Udemy courses teach you to do is follow along with the code the instructor is writing. That's an oversimplification, but that was definitely the feeling I got when I took Maximilian Schwarzmüeller's course on React Native. He really knew a lot about React Native, but didn't spend any time actually explaining the concepts and didn't test us on whether or not we understood the material; he just wrote code and we were expected to understand it just by following along. I just finished up the 2nd to last substantial section of Andrew's course, this one being on deployment of the app. For deployment, we used Heroku, which I'm comfortable using and have used in several projects before, and Prisma Cloud, which I had never used before. Prisma Cloud was awesome, though, just like the rest of the product. It had a great wizard that walked you through every step of the process and was so easy to deploy. Overall, this was one of the easiest sections in the course, but up next is testing, which I really don't have a lot of interest in. Nonetheless, I'm going to power through it and give it my all.

Until tomorrow!