A Detour from React Native

It's the weekend, so I'm able to spend a little time with the family while also get some extra time to focus on my studies. As far as the family goes, we actually got out of the house for one of the first times in the last 4 or 5 weeks today. About a week ago, we took a trip to a little area where we could walk some trails; they were just in some neighborhood, but it was still nice to get out. Other than that, I haven't left my apartment complex since I started working from home. My fiancé decided she really wanted to take our little girl to the beach today, and since the beaches are open here in Florida, I decided to go along with it. I was a bit reluctant, as I know how irrational other people in Florida can be, but I thought we could keep our distance from others. It was difficult, but we managed to get by. My feeling is that the relaxing of the stay-at-home orders is going to give people a false sense of security and they will return to not practicing social distancing and washing their hands as often. I understand that people need to get back to work, and I think it's necessary that we return to some sense of normalcy, but I do believe this is going to have an adverse effect. There are a lot of people out there who are silently carrying the virus, and allowing people to go back to their regular lives is going to cause issues. Unfortunately, the decision to risk lives for the sake of the economy was always inevitable.

Nonetheless, we had fun. We usually go to a beach called Siesta Key, which has been ranked as the #1 beach in America many years. It has bright white sand, the water is crystal clear, and the wake is minimal. Unfortunately, the parking lots for all the major beaches are closed, so we had to find an alternative route. We found a lot that had been recommended to my fiancé as safe to park in and accessed Siesta little further south than we usually do. It was pretty busy, but we managed to find a spot far enough away from other people. This was the first time my little girl had been to the beach in a while, and I was surprised to find she was afraid of the waves. She loves the water in all forms; bubble baths, pools, lakes, whatever, she's usually all about it. But, I took her just a couple feet in, and she grasped on to my leg and held on for dear life. I tried picking her up and taking her out a little further, but she really didn't want anything to do with it. As time progressed, the beach started filling up past our point of comfort, and we headed out. We tried another beach a little further south, called Nokomis Beach, and it was much less crowded. We dug a hole in the sand and collected some seashells, but pretty much stayed away from the water. We will have to take more trips to the beach soon to rid her of this fear.

Once we got back and got her down for a nap, I sat down to study for a little bit. I'm pretty deep into Stephen Grider's first of 2 courses on React Native, and it's been a great refresher on the library for me. Given I will be using React Native in my job very soon, I think it was more than necessary to take this course and the follow up. I like the structure of the course, for the most part; it's structured around building projects. I've noticed, though, that most of the concepts he's teaching really aren't unique to React Native and are more about React. Actually, the section I'm on right now has nothing to do with either; it's on building out an Express server for the upcoming application we are building. Regardless, the topics covered have been super beneficial to me, and are some great high-end React concepts. We've spent a lot of time talking about context and reducers, which are both things I'm working with a lot these days, so it's already helping me out in my other React project at work. This section about Express really isn't that beneficial since I don't do anything with the backend right now and we use .net, but I'm still learning as much as I can. The next and last section is on building an application that tracks your route when you hit a button and follows how far you went and where you went on a map. It is fully built out with authentication and everything, so it should be a really nice challenge. I only have about 7 hours left in the course, so I should be wrapping it up by Monday night and on to his advanced React Native course.

Until tomorrow!