Taking Stock

I didn't really feel like doing much work tonight. It's been a long couple of weeks at work and, with the day off tomorrow, I really would like to just take a little time tonight to relax and take it easy. Since I landed my job, I have the overwhelming feeling of reaching a goal. While I'm not one to stop and celebrate for too long, I do think it's important to take stock of the accomplishment. I don't want to put the brakes on, but I do need to refresh my brain and maybe just enjoy a movie or tv show for the night. Part of the reason I've been able to study with such vigor every night since May 26th of last year without missing a single day is because I've enjoyed learning and have looked forward to the time every night spent cultivating new skills. Tonight, I don't have that feeling, but I still can't break my streak of studying and skip a night. Because of this blog and the 100 days of code challenge, I still put my time in tonight, albeit much shorter than the normal amount of time I spend. This blog entry, too, will be a bit shorter than usual.

I spent the a little over an hour on Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp tonight and knocked up the module on pagination and sorting. Given the last section on authentication, this section was a breeze. Configuring our Node app to be able to sort and take in a limited amount of either users, posts or comments just took a few lines of code for each query and it was all very straightforward. The section itself was pretty short and the challenges were very easy. Again, Prisma is quite a powerful piece of technology and I'm continuously blown away by its capabilities. When I have more time to delve into this area, I will be going much deeper on GraphQL and Prisma. For now, I have about 5 hours left in the course and from there, my attention will be turned solely on JavaScript for a while. I will likely be going deeper on React, but not through any Udemy tutorials. From here, or when my job starts, my learning will likely come from applying information to real world applications and searching tutorials online for the answers that I need. I think this is truly one of the best ways to learn anyways, and my learning curve is going to go through the roof.

Looking back for just a minute and, like I said in the intro, taking stock of my current situation, it's pretty amazing how far I've gotten in the matter of 9 months. I hate to toot my own horn, but if you would have told me a year ago right now that I would be starting a job as a software developer in a week, I wouldn't have believed you. In fact, I would have thought this to be completely impossible. A year ago, I didn't know anything at all about coding. I didn't know what HTML was, or CSS, or JavaScript, or anything else for that matter. I had some decent computer skills, as in I could use Word, Excel, and search the web, but that was pretty much it. I didn't know anything about even trying to learn this stuff. When I first started learning, I was still in the dark in a lot of ways, not knowing how I was going to go about learning how to code, or even what language I should start with. I didn't know learning to code would evolve into learning web development, or software development. I remember when I first started, I felt bombarded by everything I needed to learn and all of the languages I would need to know, not knowing it was more important to focus on one, master it, and then continue to build upon this. I thought I was going to learn JavaScript, Python, Java, Ruby, and much more all in one year or so. I really had no idea what I was doing, but I knew if I kept plugging away, eventually I would find my way. Luckily, I'm still plugging away, and things are starting to take shape, but it didn't happen by accident, and there was a lot of hard work along the way. But, this is still only the beginning, just the start, and there's a long way to go.

Until tomorrow!