Almost on to the Next Challenge
In the last few days, I've switched over from learning Vue intensively back to learning React through Andrei Neagoie's "Complete React Developer in 2019" on Udemy. I had started this course before I had an interview for a job that used Vue, but since I haven't heard back from that company, I've decided the best plan of action is to continue immersing myself in React and the huge ecosystem that entails. I had already completed about 60% of this 39-hour course before the interview and I'm now closing in on 90%. I said that I would like to complete this course by tomorrow, and it's going to be close. I have some pretty intense sections coming up, including a 3 and a half hour marathon on the Jest testing library and a bonus section on creating a blog with GatsbyJS, both technologies I have no prior experience with. In fact, I really haven't touched on testing in any of the courses so far, so it should definitely be interesting.
Last night, I finished up an excellent section on GraphQL and Apollo, that really piqued my interest on these technologies, leaving me wanting more. After that, I was able to knock out a quick section on making our app mobile responsive before I passed out for the night. This morning, I knocked out a section that dealt with React's lazy component and Suspense, as well as the final hooks that we hadn't covered yet, useMemo and useCallback. These concepts were pretty straightforward, so no issue there. I also completed 3 more sections, one on React interview questions, one dealing with progressive web apps and making our app a PWA, and the last on creating rules in firebase for security purposes. Firebase is definitely a complex tool that will take a lot more practice if I choose to learn more about it, although in a typical job I probably wouldn't be using this. Still, it's a good tool to understand, as it is a database and databases have a lot of similarities.
I've been working on being more active on Twitter as well as LinkedIn, and I think I'm making some strides in the right direction. I'm doing the 100 days of code challenge and linking these blog entries to a post every day, hopefully to gain some exposure and get myself out there. As far as LinkedIn goes, I found some communities in there that I'm leveraging to get endorsements on my skills to make them more valid in an employer's eyes. These communities are also great for connecting with people on both a local and global level. The one missing link in my multi-pronged attack on getting this first developer job is to go to some Meetups. This is proving to be a challenge for two reasons: first is that it's way out of my comfort zone and the second is that I'm having a really hard time finding Meetups that actually align with what I'm doing. There are some open-code Meetups where people can go and code together on their own projects that meet once a month, but other than that, I'm not finding much at all. Nevertheless, I know this is what I need to do to meet the right people in this area, I just need to commit to one and do it!
Until tomorrow!
