Figuring it Out

In the last week, I've had a different feeling about this whole journey than I have over the last 6 months. I know it's because I turned down that job, and it's messing with my motivation, but knowing that doesn't solve the situation. My motivation has waned a bit, and I'm not ok with that. As I've stated, in the past when I don't feel as motivated as I usually do, I switch it up a little, either by taking a different course or working on a project on my own. Right now, I'm in the middle of my CS Prep course, so it's a little more difficult to do that. However, I've had plenty of time outside of this class to work on other stuff, so I started working on a freelance project a couple days ago. This is a website I'm doing for my aunt. The website itself doesn't have any kind of crazy functionality, like working with a database or a login system; it's just a straight up static site. I decided to do the site using Gatsby, and while there is a bit of a learning curve with this, I think this decision is going to pay off in the end. Instead of having to worry about routing, Gatsby pretty much handles this on its own. There are a lot of plugins in the Gatsby ecosystem, and you can certainly go down some rabbit holes. I'm only going to use a plugin if I absolutely need it, to keep it as simple as possible.

So far, I've implemented a navbar and routed all of the different pages through this navbar. Today, I worked on the contact page, as it is the most simple and straightforward. I made it look a little better than it does already. I then moved onto the portfolio page. As it stands right now, the portfolio page is a regular grid, with every box being the exact same size. It looks fine, but we decided we would spice it up a bit and give it a little asymmetry to draw the eye towards the better pieces in the portfolio. All of their appraisals that are more important will be bigger either in height, width, or both. I'll have all the different boxes fit together into a grid, and I think it will really pop. I'm using Material UI as a component library. Material UI layers the site with what they call "paper." This gives the site some depth and allows you to draw attention to more important pieces as well as separating out sections of the page. It looks really clean and simple, but you can also get pretty sophisticated with it. Material UI has some built-in hooks, primarily for dealing with styling objects. The system is pretty simple to understand, and the code looks really clean. If and when I need to make changes to the site, it will be really easy to go back in, change something, and deploy it back to Netlify. My biggest issue is going to be transferring from Bluehost to Netlify, since they have their Domain set up through G Suite. I'm thinking this is going to be a royal pain in the butt, but hopefully it's not as bad as I think.

I'm just getting ready to start my CS Prep course for the day. I have today, tomorrow, Wednesday, and Saturday, and then we're done. We're given a couple of problems to start off the day with, just to get the juices flowing and challenge us a little further than what we've been taught in the class. I was able to get through today's problems in about 15 minutes, leaving me 45 minutes to write this, so I don't have to worry about it later. Usually when we start the class, David, the instructor, takes the first half-hour to hour going over the previous day's problems. This class, however, he asked if anyone would like to volunteer to pair-program through the problems with him in front of the class. While I'm usually pretty shy, I figured I needed to get myself out there, as I've done throughout this whole journey, so I volunteered. There's an easier and a harder problem that we're given, and he asked me which I would have a preference in doing. I said it didn't matter to me, so he assigned me to the harder one. I spent a little time earlier refreshing myself on that problem, since we were assigned those problems 2 days ago. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to say, and I feel pretty confident with this one. It should be a great opportunity to work on my technical communication.

Until tomorrow!