Two birds stoned at once

I'm writing this now during my daughter's naptime after getting about an hour of work done because tonight will be fairly busy. My fiancé, daughter, dog, and I are all going down to Main Street for a Halloween festival when my fiancé gets off work dressed as a family of sharks, in celebration of the infamous "Baby Shark" song. This is my daughter's second Halloween, but she was so little on her first, we didn't really do much other than make a quick pass on Main Street. This time, we will be limited on time, but we're going to try and make the best of what we have and get plenty of photos to look back on. My daughter, who's now 16 months old, is really going to get a kick out of our costumes and seeing everyone else all dressed up. It should be a lot of fun.

Later, I have my pair programming session with Matt in Australia. We haven't talked much on what we're going to be working on yet, but we may just pick up where we left off last week. We had started a problem set from Will Sentance's "Hard Parts: Functional JavaScript;" it was going really well, but we only got through about 5 problems of the 15 or so in total. The remaining problems are going to be quite tricky, but I'm sure we can get through a few of them, at least. Doing this pair programming has been one of the most valuable things in my entire journey so far. Working with someone else on problem sets who I consider to be far more advanced than I am has taught me a lot, and verbally processing exercises is extremely useful for building technical communication skills. While last week I was pretty nervous about the whole idea of exposing my weaknesses to someone else, this week I'm really excited to tackle those weaknesses and get better in those areas.

My work today consists of 2 things: working through Edabit's JavaScript exercises and starting Jem Young's "Full Stack for Front End Engineers" on Frontend Masters. There are only so many exercises I can do before my head feels like it's going to explode, so it's nice to take a break from the deep dive on JavaScript and turn my attention to something else. So far, I really like the way Jem teaches and the course is really captivating. The concepts are fairly unfamiliar to me, but integral to understanding how everything works in a more complete way. This course is going to help me learn how the internet really works, and what's going on behind the scenes when I'm deploying apps and using NodeJS in general, which is a huge part of being a web developer, even if you just focus on the front end of things. As far as Edabit goes, I'm still really loving the problem sets and am becoming more and more comfortable working in JavaScript every day. There are so many exercises on this platform, so this is something that's going to keep me busy for a long time to come.

Until tomorrow!