Learning a lot

Last night, I was up just about every hour with severe pains in my broken leg. I would wake up with the top of my left foot screaming in pain. I didn't make a sound when I actually broke my leg, and if you didn't look down at it, you might have thought it was just a normal day for me. Part of that was due to shock, but I think my pain threshold is much higher after I had my knee surgery about 7 years ago. The pain following that surgery was like nothing I've experienced in my life, and it lasted for quite a while. I showed less resilience last night when I got those pains in my foot. I went to the doctor today to get my wounds redressed and, when they unwrapped it, there was a big red spot that looked slightly bruised right where I was feeling the most pain. I don't know if I had an allergic reaction or if the compression from swelling caused it, but hopefully the way they rewrapped it helps with sleep tonight.

Several times throughout the night, I woke up to this pain and decided the best distraction would be to work on a project. I started a project using the Star Wars API yesterday and actually finished it up this morning. It turned out a lot better than I thought it would, and I really like the end result. Most of all, it's 100 percent my own work; I got into some jams but I was able to find my way out. Through these past 2 projects, the portfolio and this Star Wars project, I've learned so much about how React works in actuality. It really is true that there's only so much you can learn from tutorials before you have to start doing it on your own. Of course, without the tutorials, I wouldn't even know where to begin. The best part of these projects is that it's exposing my weaknesses so I know exactly what I need to learn more about and practice. I deployed this project and added to the array of projects on my portfolio, putting it up towards the top. On a side note, I discovered a really simple, but awesome, animation library and implemented it on this site. The effects look awesome!

Since I spent part of my day at the doctor's office and a lot of the rest of it in a sleepless stupor, I kind of bumbled around from one idea to the next after I finished the Star Wars project. I watched about half of a video on hooks by Jason Lengstorf on Youtube and was inspired to try and implement them myself. For my next project, I wanted to use an API that had an image property assigned to the data, to display those in either a card or some other type of item. I found an API called News API and decided to try and set it up using the useEffect hook and useState. I thought it might be as easy as Jason made it look, but after about 2 hours of trial and error, I was finally able to render a list of titles to news articles. From there, I thought I would check out Material UI to use something different than Semantic UI for a change, and had no idea what I was biting off. Material UI is incredibly complex. They have their own built-in hooks, which is great for what I'm wanting to do, but this is going to be an epic project. I want to set up a navbar with different sections of a news site, where on each page the most recent articles associated with that topic are associated in a card style with a dropdown component. So far, I've implemented a top headlines page and a reusable card I can put in on each of these pages, but it's going to take some work to try and figure out how to have different pages rendering different content. I think in the long run using hooks should help with this, but I need to learn some more first.

Until tomorrow!