Stretching My Brain

I'm coming to my last few hours of my weekend, and it's been a nice couple of days off from the work grind. I was able to get some good studying in, and feel like some of my motivation has been revitalized. I've talked several times in the past month or so about the difficulty I've been having with finding a good job in the field and how it's affected me. I think this, in conjunction with my job ramping up for the season has made it a lot more difficult to stay focused in my hours of study. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy, and I knew from the beginning it was going to be an arduous road. I sometimes think about it from the perspective of someone going back to school to become re-trained in another field. At a community college, you would at least expect there to be 2 years of school before you could even think about entering that field, and at a university, you would be looking at 4, if not more for a graduate degree. Software development is unique, offering multiple ways to enter the workforce in a much shorter span of time. Of course, there's the option of going back to school for a Computer Science degree, but then there's also the 3 to 6 month bootcamps, and then there's what I did, which may be the most difficult path to follow. I've chosen to learn it on my own, finding my own resources and trying to make it without spending an arm and a leg. I think this path has taught me a lot about how I learn and given me a higher level of determination than I've ever had in my life. There are caveats though; I can't rely on a network for finding a job and learning the material can be like finding your way in the dark sometimes, but I'll get there regardless, and hopefully within a year of starting.

Over the weekend, I was able to spend a lot of time with my daughter. My fiancé worked most of the weekend, so this meant it was mostly just me and her. We had a blast, and it was really nice to spend some one-on-one time with her. I also caught up on some rest, in a big way. I talked about this yesterday, but I've really been drained of energy in the last couple of weeks, and I think I just got behind on sleep. I got to the point where I was falling asleep constantly in the middle of studying and having a really hard time concentrating. I usually try to study throughout her naps when I'm home from work, but yesterday I took a 2 hour nap myself, and today, I had to get some cleaning done. We both work tomorrow, on a Sunday, so we don't have the option of putting our daughter in daycare, so we're having a babysitter come and watch her. This lady watched her a week or 2 ago, and she was really good with her, so we feel comfortable having her watch her for the day. Tomorrow, it's back to the grind, with 2 tournaments in one day and another one on Monday. It's a good thing I caught up on some rest, because I'm going to need it.

I've been working hard on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy, and he's got my fingers bleeding. I've never followed a tutorial that moved as fast as this one, and I'm really struggling to keep up. We completed a project yesterday, and I was able to follow pretty much everything. There's a lot more functionality involved with these apps than I'm used to in the typical React apps I've been building, but I could understand it pretty well. Then, we started another app. This app is used to demonstrate the navigation package used with React-Native, suitably called React-Navigation. I suspected it to be just like React-Router, and thought it would be a walk in the park. React-Router is really straightforward, and I feel like it could be learned in an afternoon with ease. React-Navigation, on the other hand, is incredibly complicated. Looking at the code, I can definitely read and understand it, but there's just so much to know. We really aren't even using that many of the built-in features of it, and it's still blowing my mind. This is a package that I would need to have the docs open constantly to implement at this stage. Instead of taking our time going over it, Max is just flying through it like it's no big deal. I'm really starting to miss Stephen Grider's style. I don't regret the decision of going with Max's course; in fact, I think I'm getting a really nice overview of the entire ecosystem in a really efficient manner, but there's no doubt in my mind I should have started with Stephen's course and then moved on to Max's. Up next after this section is a section on Redux, which I'm guessing is going to be a real wild ride.

Until tomorrow!