Finally

After a long month of grinding this course out, I'm finally done with Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New Modern JavaScript Bootcamp. It was a real doozy, but well worth the admission price. For only $10, I got over 52 hours of high quality instruction by 2 of the best instructors out there for web development. The first half of this course was taught by Colt Steele, and covered JavaScript, from A to Z. It's true that some topics didn't go into great depths, but given this wasn't my first time seeing the material, I was okay with that. I think if it was my first time learning JavaScript, this would be a really nice introduction to the language and would give the pupil a great base to build on. It would be impossible to master the language after taking this one course, but there's a lot of material packed into the 52 hours. The second half of the course was strictly project-based, and was taught by Stephen Grider. Surprisingly, we spent a lot more time than I thought we would working on NodeJS-based projects, and I really liked that. For most of the projects on here, I felt like I could walk away from this course and re-create the same thing or something similar on my own, given the knowledge I had accrued. However, the e-commerce site was much more complex, and while I did learn a lot during this project, I would have a really hard time implementing it on my own.

In the last couple weeks, someone from my cohort of Codesmith's CS Prep course and I have been talking back and forth quite a bit. During the course, we spent an evening pair-programming, and while we didn't actually achieve as much as we would have hoped, it was still the beginning of a nice working relationship. We then ended up on the same team for the final project and have kept talking ever since the course ended. In fact, on Thursday, we spent close to 3 hours doing some pair programming, and it ended up being a really nice session. While he's only been coding for about a month or so, he's learned a lot and his JavaScript skills really aren't that far behind mine. He hasn't developed any of the other skills involved with web development yet, but that will all come. In the meantime, he's asked me for some guidance as to what resources to use and what to focus his time on. It feels awesome being able to try and help someone walk a similar road that I've travelled in the past 7 months, and if I can make his path easier than mine, that would be great. Today, he texted me out of the blue to see if I could help him with a couple problems, so we hopped on a Zoom call. The problems he was working through were pretty difficult, but we were able to break them down and figure them out together. It's definitely a great feeling to put my knowledge to use and help someone else out.

Since I'm now finally done with my epic of a course, it's time to direct my attention elsewhere. I talked about it yesterday, but my plan is to get to work on my aunt's business' website. I've already created quite a bit of the groundwork as a Gatsby site, but I'm seriously considering starting from scratch as just a React site, and don't think it would put me too far behind to do so. This would definitely allow me some more freedom to work in a framework I'm most comfortable with. Gatsby is great, and I've spent a good deal of time diving deep with it, but there's still a lot of nuanced stuff I haven't completely wrapped my head around, and I feel like I would end up spending a lot time researching new things instead of building the site itself. This is a pretty basic site in its functionality, with the hardest part of it being the styling. There's no sign-up or shopping cart or anything too crazy, but I do plan to make it a little more complicated than it is. For one of the pages in the site, my plan is to create a really cool grid for their portfolio of work they've done, but beyond that, it's not going to be the hardest project I've built by any stretch of the imagination. Once I get rolling on it, it should be a lot of fun to create.

Until tomorrow!