Extra Day

It's Monday, and I would usually be at work right now. Of course, it's Memorial Day and I'm getting to enjoy an extended weekend for the first time in a long time. I've made it to the pool with my daughter the last 2 days, but today, the weather isn't quite right. It's windy and overcast with a high only in the 70s, so we're just laying low at the house. It's been a nice relaxing day, though, and I feel rested and recuperated. I'm looking forward to getting back at the React Native project at work tomorrow, and we have a lot we need to do on the project still. The original deadline was for some time in the first half of June, but there's no way that's going to happen. I think we could have done it, but it wouldn't be to the same level we've gotten it to at this point. Part of delivering product is knowing when to add features or improve features and when to wait until the next version. I feel the pressure from the executives to get something out the door, and I think at this point, it's more important to get the functionality working for everything we can and get it shipped. That's not always universally understood, though, and sometimes things seem to get iterated over too quickly. Again, I'm all for delivering a polished product, but at some point, the buzzer is going to sound, and the heat is really going to be on. When that time comes, we will likely find ourselves in a situation where we just have to get it shipped and we may not take the time on things that need to be taken time with.

While I'm at home this weekend, I've been hard at work on this microservices course by Stephen Grider. It started off being a pretty difficult course, but I was keeping up, for the most part. We've implemented many Docker containers and a Kubernetes cluster, and I was doing pretty well with this. I wouldn't say I could go out and create my own Kubernetes cluster, but I was managing, and I seemed to understand it pretty well. In the first project at the beginning of the course, we created our own event bus from scratch, and even this wasn't too confusing. Now, we're deep in the throes of using NATS streaming service, and I'll tell you, this has been the most complicated part of the whole course. I can barely keep up and am confused most of the time. I totally understand why the people working with this stuff get paid the big bucks; it's just hard. I feel like if I spent the next several months focusing on nothing other than these topics, I might come close to grasping it, but at this point, I still have a ways to go. I am enjoying it, other than the massive amounts of configuration files you end up having to write. That part, I could take or leave. I'm sure, if this is what you did for a living, that would get old, but you might just get used to it. I don't know if I want to be a full blown DevOps developer or anything, but I do want to understand how all this stuff works and be able to work with it on my own at some point. And if a job has Docker or Kubernetes as a requirement, I want to be able to hold my own when asked about it.

When I first started learning software development, I would always get excited about learning something new. At that point, it was like another thing I could add to the list of things I knew, and I enjoyed that feeling. I thought after a while, I would end up getting exasperated by having to learn something new. It turns out, that isn't the case. I still get excited when I come to a topic I've never learned about. It's like turning a new page. When you spend so much time learning about JavaScript and React, it's refreshing to get introduced and spend a little time on something else completely. However, sometimes that feeling doesn't last that long. I still feel excited to be learning about Docker and Kubernetes, and I still want to go learn more about those topics, but NATS, I could close the book on that one and be completely fine. I understand the idea of event buses is kind of integral to the whole process of microservices, but this has been a total slog trying to get through these sections. I'm nearing the end of it, and I'm looking forward to whatever comes next, if only because it won't be NATS.

Until tomorrow!