Bogged Down

Today was the first day of my weekend, and given how long of a week it was, I was drained. This seems to happen a lot during our peak season. I always have big plans to do a bunch of stuff on my weekends after working so hard during the week and spending all of my time at work, but by the time I get to the weekend, I have no energy left to enjoy it. During the offseason, we had a really nice schedule set up, where we could all still get full time while enjoying 3 days off every week. Now, I still kind of have Mondays off, but I teach a clinic that takes up my mornings, and I don't end up getting home until 12:30 on Mondays. It's like a half day, but it's a pretty taxing day nonetheless. I was planning on taking my little girl to the park, but my fiancé took the car with the car seat in it. We have another car seat, but it's a complicated installation process, and I really didn't feel like going through that today. So, instead, I ordered up some Uber Eats for breakfast and we hung out at home. It was a nice relaxing morning, and it gave me some time to keep my ankle elevated. I stopped wearing the boot I've been wearing for the last 3 months since I broke my ankle just this week, and it's been a bit of a rough transition. It doesn't hurt that much to walk on it, but by the end of the work day, it's swollen to twice the normal size. It looks a lot better tonight, and I think it was good to get off of it.

During my daughter's 3 hour nap, I got about an hour of studying in before I fell asleep for a long nap. Like I said, I'm drained. I still feel pretty tired, but I think I caught up on some much needed rest between last night and today, which should put me in better shape for the week to come. It was easy to burn the candle from both ends during the offseason, staying up late to study and getting up early to go to work, but it's a little more complicated with the schedule now. Every day at work seems to take 3 times more effort than it does in the offseason and, by the end of the day, I don't have much left to give. Back in December, I received on offer for a software developer position close by, but the offer itself wasn't all that good, so I turned it down. Looking back, I still wonder if the negatives of the offer outweighed the positives of experience and doing something I'm passionate about. I was also working under the pretense that more offers would be right around the corner, which hasn't been the case yet. I'm applying to a ton of jobs, but nothing seems to be producing any results lately. In December, I had multiple interviews in one week and seemed to be really picking up steam. Now, I'm only hearing back from desperate recruiters that shut me down as soon as they know I have no experience. I think I need to re-evaluate my approach to finding a job, but I'm at a bit of a loss.

Between the hour of studying I did earlier and the time I spent after getting my daughter down for bed, I'm progressing nicely with React Native. I've been working on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide, which has turned out to be a really nice course on Udemy. Max's pace is breakneck, and I'm having to stop the video to catch up more than I have in a long time. This is partly due to the code being different than what I'm used to, meaning it's less predictable for me. Otherwise, I think I would still have to pause it quite a bit if I was completely comfortable with React Native; he just moves really fast. We just put the finishing touches on a nice-sized number guessing game, which turned out to be really cool. We covered quite a few concepts in this app and dealt with differences in platforms, responsive to portrait versus landscape mode for the phone, and a logical approach to navigation without a menu. In fact, this app has more business logic than most apps I've worked on before. I don't know if it's just that complicated or if this is normal in React Native, but my presumption is that we just built a fairly complicated app, regardless of the framework. There were a couple of components where we had 4 or 5 different instances of useState and a couple of instances of useEffect, including 5 or 6 helper functions and ternary operators all over the place. I could keep up, but if I were trying to recreate this from scratch, it would be a lot for me to wrap my head around. I'm at the point in understanding where I can read and understand any JavaScript code, which is great, but if you asked me to implement a large-scale app with a lot of intertwined logic, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I feel like this takes a lot of time to get to a point where you're comfortable problem-solving your way through something like this, but I'm definitely making progress.

Until tomorrow!