Now to get to Work

I'm excited to announce that, after nearly 9 months of toiling away, I've taken a job as a Software Developer. I now have a title. This is a moment I've been dreaming about for months now, and it seems a bit surreal. I started this journey on May 26th of last year, after getting fed up with my current position in life. I've worked as a golf professional for nearly 5 years now, and realized I was always going to have to work long hours, weekends, and be treated as a servant by the members and customers. I was going to end up missing out on all kinds of memories with my daughter, most of all, and that was not acceptable to me. For years now, I've been interested in getting into coding, but had no idea where to start, or was too afraid to take the first steps. I think these days, it's much easier than it was even 5 years ago to take those first steps, given the amount and variety of online instruction you can find, but even so, those first steps felt like jumping off a cliff. I always thought it was necessary to go through a bootcamp to land a job. While that certainly makes things easier in a lot of ways, there are so many other paths to success, and if you have the willpower to push yourself forward, you can definitely do it on your own.

As far as the job goes, I had a somewhat difficult time nailing down exactly what my job description was going to be. They use a variety of technologies across several different platforms, but it sounds like my focus will be on the front end in the JavaScript world. They are using a few Vue components, but most of their frontend code is written strictly in HTML and CSS, with some JavaScript, as well. It sounds like they've had some issues with using Vue and want to move away from it towards React, which is definitely something I will be advocating for. I talked to one of their developers for quite a while who works primarily on their SEO, and I think she's a little hesitant to get too deep into React, since it's pretty unfriendly with SEO. I suggested Gatsby, and she didn't seem to know much about it, so maybe I can get them on board with that. Otherwise, it sounds like they are more than willing to teach me everything they know and let me be a part of everything, which means I'm going to get to learn a lot. They use .NET on the backend with SQL as a database management. It sounds like they have some type of PHP code involved in some part of their backend, as well, with Laravel as a framework. They are also interested in getting involved with AI, so there could be some really interesting things to learn on that front. Overall, they have a ton of projects going on and a lot of work they want to get done, so I'm going to get a lot of exposure.

I had to make some phone calls when I got the little girl done to let my parents know the big news and talk about it with my fiancé, so I actually didn't end up with a ton of time to study. Still, I got about an hour and a half in on Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp. As we started doing yesterday, we are migrating all of the mutations over to using Prisma specifically, instead of having everything written with Node, and it is so nice. We deleted over 100 lines of code and replaced it with about 25 lines, all doing the same thing. Prisma is like my new best friend; it solves so many problems in such an elegant way, and just makes sense. We had several challenges in the work today to migrate these mutations over to Prisma, and while I did get tripped up on one of them, the majority of them were pretty smooth. In fact, we were migrating over a few of the mutations as a class without doing them as a challenge, and I decided it would be good practice to just go ahead and attempt them on my own without watching the video. I was able to do this pretty easily. I don't know if this is just an area that I excel in or if Prisma and GraphQL are this easy for everyone, but overall, this class has made me feel really confident in my abilities in this area. I'm wondering if it's just Andrew's teaching style, and if he's that good. If that's the case, I really need to take his course on React, which has a section specifically on Redux. If he can make me feel this way about Redux, I will be amazed.

Until tomorrow!