Sidetracked

I'll be honest: I got a little bored with the mySQL course. It's just not something that really interests me all that much right now. I know I need to learn it, and I'm certainly going to finish this course and take another course on SQL, but I needed some supplementals. As I discussed yesterday, I think it's part of my job to fully understand and be able to work across our entire stack at work. Right now, I'm working in one little niche area. I guess it's not so little; I basically only work with anything that has any kind of functionality on the frontend. We have a lot of articles we put on our website that are written entirely in HTML and CSS. There is a bit of functionality in some forms that are associated with these pages, but that's about it, other than some routing. My first project was actually to work on the validation for these forms, but as soon as I finished that up, I never looked back. Ever since, I've worked primarily on a payments application that is written in React and now on a dashboard for the representatives that is written in React Native. Just me and another guy work on the functionality on the frontend, and that's it. We have a lot of work on our hands, so getting outside of this area is a lot to ask. However, he is fully capable of doing some light work in C# for the backend and even interacting with the database. There are quite a few occasions where we have to take something from the backend and use that data. That's no problem for me on the frontend, but my cohort ends up getting stuck doing all of the communication on the backend side. I would like to be able to help him, but I need more knowledge.

Obviously, I have found that what I'm most interested in are things involving the frontend, specifically React, for now at least. I would definitely like to be proficient across the full stack at some point, but this isn't an immediate goal. I still want to be able to learn as much as I can about our stack at work, though, so I'm going to continue learning about SQL, and then eventually learn ASP and PHP. At the same time, though, I would like to be learning something that interests me a little more. I stumbled across a course on Udemy a couple days ago that has intrigued me, and finally yesterday, after a couple hours working on SQL, I decided I would give it a go. My plan is to study this course every other day, and the SQL course on the other days. It's going to be a lot of new material on both ends, but at least I'll be able to break up the monotony of SQL with something really interesting. This is a 45 hour course that I'm taking on, and it really doesn't have anything to do with what I do at work, but it's going to be some great material for possible future ventures, and give me a better understanding of the world of software development today.

The course I'm talking about is Microservices with React and Node, by Stephen Grider. This covers a huge breadth of topics, including Docker and Kubernetes. Honestly, I didn't really even understand what microservices were when I got into the course, but I've heard the term so much, I figured it was important. Basically, and this is probably a huge generalization and possibly wrong, microservices refers to breaking up an app into smaller parts. For example, if you had an e-commerce site, you would have a microservice for products, with its own database, a microservice for users with its own database, one for payments with its own database, and so on. The key idea is that you would never call a database outside of its own microservice directly. Therefore, if for some reason the products microservice goes down, the rest of the site would remain intact. The old way of doing things, and the way we do things at my company, is to have one central database that is handled by a monolith backend to manage everything. If something goes down on the backend, the entire structure collapses. I don't know yet how Docker and Kubernetes are involved in this process, but I know they are covered in this course. It's also nice to be able to use React with this process, along with Node. I don't know how applicable this will be in my day-to-day, but you never know, it may end being something I push to implement going forward.

Until tomorrow!