The value of time
Every day, I'm finding new ways to speed up every single thing that I do involving web development. When I first started out just a couple months ago, it took me a while just to find the command line, not withstanding I had no idea what to do when I got there. I don't know how many hours I've spent trying to get sites to deploy. My first experiences with vsCode were also nightmarish; I thought it was an awful tool, but it turns out I was just awful. I bet even the speed of my typing has improved by 10 WPMs since beginning this journey; that equates to a lot of time saved right there.
I wouldn't say that my learning speed has been slow, by any means. I've learned a ridiculous amount(in my opinion...) in 2 months, but looking back over that time, I see so much loss of efficiency that I've now gained back. With all of the cool tricks that can be done with the command line, I am trying my best to avoid the mouse whenever possible, but I'm still nowhere near full capabilities with the command line. Since yesterday, I now feel comfortable deploying without issue through the Netlify CLI. It's seamless and integrates continuously with Github, so it's awesome. All you have to do is push to Github and it automatically re-deploys your site. That right there will save me so much time; Netlify is offering a phenomenal service here, and it's free!
I've learned some new shortcuts for using vsCode and the extensions that you can enable with ease. When creating projects with React or Vue, the syntax is specific to these frameworks(library in React's case, or not, whatever) so it's so helpful to have hinters and shortcuts set up to save keystrokes. Heck, I just realized the other day that CSS props can be written in a matter of 2 or 3 keystrokes; for example, to set height to 50px, you could simply type h50, hit tab, et voila! You have yourself a CSS property! There's still so much more that I could be doing with it, and I'm sure if you give me 2 more months, I'll be a whiz!
Today, I was able to get through quite a bit of Colt Steele's Modern React Bootcamp, completing sections 9 through 13, with 2 small deploys earlier. Sections 9 through 12 went into more depth in dealing with state and introduced 2 simple projects, one demonstrating a coin flip and one where you could click on boxes and the colors would change. These projects were very simple, but great practice in using these concepts of state. There were 2 larger projects as well, one a Hangman game and one a Lights Out game. These were both awesome, but unfortunately the projects were not built from scratch. Colt had us just finish up the project that he had started. It was awesome to do this, because I just focused on the ideas that he was presenting, but I would have loved to be able to add these to my repertoire of projects on my Github account. Since they aren't my projects from start to finish, I won't be adding them to the repository. Even though most of my projects are code-alongs, I still had to struggle through the errors with these projects. When I finished those projects, I felt like I owned them; these I did not. The last section I worked on dealt with creating forms in React. This section was loaded with information and the following section works through an exercise implementing a form, so I'm looking forward to getting my grubby hands on that!
Until tomorrow!
