Ran Out of Steam

I may have bitten off more than I could chew over the weekend, but I ended up getting the job done, at the end of the day. Pluralsight runs a free weekend every once in a while to lure in new customers, so I went over and checked it out. After trial and error with a couple of other courses I ended up not liking too much, I ended up settling on Cory House's "Building Applications with React and Redux," a comprehensive view of React and Redux centered around a project. The project was a list of courses pulled from a dataset and displayed on the screen with the option to add, update or delete these courses. I thought it would be really cool to change this data set from being Pluralsight courses to being great Youtube videos I've found over the last 6 months, but I wasn't able to get it to deploy through Netlify or Now. Instead of doing this through Create-React-App, Cory built webpack configuration from scratch, and so there were some things that were slightly off when it came to build time.

Regardless, this was a 6 and a half hour course, and I started running out of time before midnight to complete the course before I lost my free weekend. In fact, when it came to midnight, I still had about 2 and a half hours to go before I finished the course. But, nothing happened. I finally did finish at about 2:30, and luckily Pluralsight was still giving me access to the course, otherwise I wouldn't be able to take credit for completing the course on my portfolio and add to my tally of completed courses. I'm now up to 325 hours of coursework completed, which I'm really proud of. If you think about it, I've probably covered as much ground as somebody would taking 2 to 3 years at a university, and I've done this in 6 months. Not to mention, most of the time, I'm diving deeper, doing homework, so my total time studying is way bigger than 325 hours. If you were to break it down, I would say I've studied on average about 4 hours every night for the last 180 days, so I'm at around 720 hours of studying. I believe in the 10,000 hour rule, where mastery of a topic isn't reached until 10,000 hours have been put in, so I would say if I can continue this trend for the next 6 to 7 years, I should be at the highest echelon of this field.

Because I worked until 2:30 last night, I was completely exhausted this morning. My little girl has decided she doesn't need to sleep any later than when the sun comes up now, so I might have gotten 3 or 4 hours of sleep total. While my parents are in town, I've been trying to take advantage of the extra time to study and get some work done during the day while they watch Kaija, but instead I took a healthy nap. I fell asleep around 11 and didn't wake up until almost 3. While it was really refreshing and I should be able to get a lot of work done tonight and stay up late, I feel like I lost a lot of time during the day today. At the end of the day, though, I need sleep to be able to focus and learn, otherwise my efforts will be futile. So, tonight, I'm embarking on a new video series on Youtube by Classsed that is a tutorial on building yet another blog site with Gatsby, found here. I'm about 6 videos into this series now, and I really like it so far. It's fairly simple, so far, but I expect it to get a lot more complicated once GraphQL is introduced. I wanted to take this course to get some more practice using Gatsby before I dive in and build something from scratch with it, but I want to become really good with Gatsby. I think JAMstack jobs are coming soon; right now, it's hard to find many, but I think this is the way of the future in a lot of ways. It definitely doesn't solve all problems, but for most companies, they're going to want to take a look at transitioning their site over from a traditional framework to something like this with content being managed through a CMS of some sort. If I can jump on this bandwagon while it's still mostly in its infancy, I think I could be setting myself up really well.

Until Tomorrow!