Growing Knowledge Base

I made it through Wednesday, and with tomorrow being the last day of this short week, the anticipation is killing me. I'm still struggling to get the tasks I need delegated to me to be as productive as possible, so that's making the week really drag. I've found, and I think most people will attest to this, when I have a lot of work to do, time really flies by. I would prefer to spend my day as busy as possible, but that's just not always something that can happen. If I'm not given the work that I need, I can't perform the tasks I need to perform. I rely heavily on the mockups my cohort creates for the different screens in our React Native application, but those mockups have dried up lately. For a while, I was really making some progress. I was getting all of the mockups I needed and I was able to create at a pretty quick pace. Then, my cohort started working on a components library and it seems like he's completely lost track of the task at hand. In the meantime, there is only so much I can do to keep myself busy.

In our weekly meeting today, our CEO talked about something that's really been on my mind for quite a while: project management. Right now, we don't have any kind of system to manage projects, and it really drives me nuts. You would think that the freedom to be able to do whatever you want would be a good thing, and sometimes it is. To me, though, you need a system to be able to keep things going in the right direction. I've talked a lot about it, but the dissemination of information is so important, especially in a small company like this. Someone like me, who really doesn't have much experience as a software developer, needs some direction when working on enterprise-level projects like we are. We are basically creating an application that has the same functionality as something like Salesforce, maybe not on the same scale, but to a certain extent. Trying to do that without any kind of project structure is a nightmare, in my opinion. Our CEO said they have a plan to implement a system for project management that will be much stronger than what they have in place right now, and I am really excited to see what that means. In fact, I might try to meet with him tomorrow to discuss the specifics of this.

More exciting to me has been my personal studies. All of my attention outside of work has turned completely towards learning Python, and it is exciting. I'm still in the very early stages of learning it, which really isn't that exciting, but I love to learn something brand new. I'm having all kinds of flashbacks to when I was learning JavaScript. I've been thinking back to the struggles I encountered when learning how to work with functions, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. Python has a similar way of doing things with just a different syntax and some different rules. All of the issues I was having with learning JavaScript, I'm just breezing right through now. The course by Andrei Neagoie is actually really good and I'm learning at a perfect pace. I'm still in the beginner modules of the course, but I really can't wait to get into the more advanced stuff. I know I'm not ready yet, so I'm not even looking at anything, but there are a ton of cool things in the Python ecosystem, just like with JavaScript. I can't wait to be able to understand how to use these new toys.

Until tomorrow!