Progress Day

For the first time since I was in school, I actually get to enjoy a holiday weekend. I've always worked jobs that had their busiest days on holidays or over holiday weekends, meaning I would have to be there. I've worked too many Thanksgivings and Christmases than I would like to count. Up until we had our little girl, though, it wasn't a huge deal. It was a bit frustrating to have to work while the rest of my extended family was on vacation together, but we made the best of it. Everyone in my family work in the education sector and they always have long breaks over holidays and the summer. Whenever they were off, we weren't able to get off work. Other than that, though, we just adapted and it was no big deal. Now that I have a daughter, holidays mean memories, and I'll be darned if I'm going to miss out on those. I basically have 18 Christmases with my little girl before she's all grown up, and I don't want to miss a single one. Memorial Day isn't a holiday we really celebrate or anything, but I'm very excited to have 3 days off. I've been working pretty hard since I started, so it will be nice to be able to kick back and relax.

Of course, as always, I'll get to spend a little extra time studying, too, and I'm excited for that, as well. I've been working on a course about microservices by Stephen Grider, and really enjoying it. This is not a topic that is going to affect what I do on a daily basis in this job, but I think it could be a useful asset to my repertoire going forward. I'm learning a ton about Docker and Kubernetes, which are incredibly hot topics right now. These technologies are mostly used in the DevOps world, but I've seen plenty of job descriptions that would like the applicant to know something about this realm. I actually really like DevOps, but I don't love the configuration involved. Just like with Webpack, it seems like you end up spending half the time writing config files, and it's not the most fun thing in the world. For the most part, these config files seem to have quite a bit of boilerplate that is consistent from one file to the next, and I'm guessing there are some technologies that streamline this process. I can't imagine it would be that appealing to get into this area of expertise if all it entails is writing config files. Of course, there's a lot more to it than that, but I have spent many hours installing different tools and writing these files in the last two weeks.

I was able to get quite a bit done today, and I felt like I made some nice progress. I started off the day with working on the filters for the search. When I left work yesterday, I had a bug in the code that I thought was coming from my end of the code. When I set one filter, and then unset it, leaving no filters checked, about 250 of the leads were dropping off the list. Something was happening to the list, so I had to do some digging. It turns out it was coming from the backend. When my cohort set up the API, he checked the cities for the filter by which cities were listed as active for the representative, but this didn't encompass all the cities for the leads. Once he queried the right information, everything seemed to work fine. We have an issue, though: in this particular representative's list of cities, there are 268 cities listed. Nobody would want to look through a list this long, so we have to change this. We are either going to take out the cities filter altogether, or create a search function for this filter, so the representative would search for the cities they wanted and select them. After working on that for a while, I hopped over to the map component I had started working on. I began hooking up Leaflet to work with the application, but I was having all kinds of problems. I looked around and found something called react-map-gl(I think?) and set to work getting this up and running. It turns out it wasn't that bad to get hooked up, and it looks really nice. I still have a lot of work to do on this and the date range filter on Tuesday, so at least I have some things to work on.

Until tomorrow!