Overcame some adversity today

Last night, I started looking for a course to take after completing a nice course on GraphQL. My goal is to have a better understanding of Gatsby and to be able to create some projects from scratch with this technology. Gatsby relies heavily on 2 technologies: React and GraphQL. I feel very comfortable with React at this point, but GraphQL is very complicated and it's going to take a lot of time to master that skill. For those unfamiliar, Gatsby acts as a framework that sits on top of React, with a lot of really cool features that optimize for SEO and help to build sites quickly. It's not a simple framework, although you could treat it as such if you were to install a theme and leave it at that. If taken in its basic form and built up from there, it can become as complicated as you want it to become. It's very opinionated, which is good and bad, depending on how you look at it. I really like it, but I still have a lot to learn.

I settled on a 4 and a half hour course on Youtube by Andrew Mead called " The Great Gatsby Bootcamp." I've seen a lot of courses by him on Udemy and have been on the brink of taking one many times, but have never happened to do so. This one was made back in April of this year, so I figured I would have no issues with breaking changes. I really liked how he explained things; he took his time and didn't gloss over anything. Some instructors assume that you have knowledge that you might not, and if anything Andrew might have gone a little too far on the other side of the spectrum, but I was very satisfied. I spent some time destructuring some things he left undone, just because it's really good practice for me to expand on the tutorials that I'm working through instead of just following along. Then, about 3 hours into the tutorial, I installed one of the plugins he instructed us to install, and I broke the whole damn thing. This was at about 11 last night; I spent 2 hours scouring the internet to try and find anyone that had the same issue and came up empty-handed. I went to bed frustrated and annoyed.

I woke up this morning, and I realized I really wanted to finish this course, one way or another. I spent a solid 3 hours working through different solutions I found on Stack Overflow and kept having the same problem. I was on the brink of giving it up and throwing in the towel, when I finally got it to work. It required reverting my version of Node back to 10 and deleting something from the Node module of that plugin, but it worked. It turns out that the end product didn't even use that plugin, but I was proud of myself nonetheless for persevering through this issue and finding a workable solution. The end product of this course was a blog site with an about me and contact page, as well as a home page. The blog content is coming from Contentful, a headless CMS similar to the one I use for this blog site, Storyblok. I'm changing quite a bit of the styling right now to make it look better, and then I'm considering migrating all 127 blog entries I've put into this blog and changing over to that as my blog's permanent home. This would allow me to have a lot more freedom over the content I'm putting into my entries, basically letting me create HTML elements within the entries. I could add images, put in different headers, line breaks, bold or italic font styles, lists, and a whole lot more. If I can get the styling to look nice, it would be a huge improvement over the rudimentary setup I have now. So, it looks like I have a nice project to work on now!

Until tomorrow!