Much to Learn

Every Monday, throughout our busy season at work, we host a clinic for the ladies at our club. I talked about this last week, but I just wanted to talk about it again in relation to my coding journey. Since I started as a golf professional, I went from never teaching before to being quite good at it. I'm not perfect, but I've learned a lot over the last few years about teaching. My first few individual lessons were abysmal; I had a really hard time taking command of the situation and I don't think I was really effective. As I got more comfortable and my confidence in my abilities grew, I was able to better express my ideas in a way that my students could learn from. After quite a few lessons, I felt like my skills on one-to-one basis were pretty good, but talking in front of a bigger group was a different story. I've always had a fear of public speaking, and even a group of 5 people frightened me. I knew, though, the only way I was going to get past this is to just do it. So, another assistant and I started a clinic for ladies last year and got to work. The first few clinics were really shaky, and I'm sure they could tell I was nervous. By the end of the season, though, I could stand up there and direct the group in a way I never could before. This year, I lead every clinic with confidence and I have no nerves whatsoever. I think, directly because of this, our participation numbers are way up, the ladies in our group come back week after week, and they tell their friends to come out as well.

These clinics take a lot out of me, though. I was back home by about 12:30 today, and I expected to get some work done. After about 30 minutes of studying, my eyes crossed and I succumbed to a nap. Usually, when I take a nap, I'm out for about 15 minutes and then I get right back to it, but I slept for about 3 hours. I must have needed it, but I still feel like I need more. I think all of this lack of sleep over the last 8 months is starting to catch up to me, and I need to make sure I'm getting a good balance. Otherwise, my level of attentiveness during my studies will diminish and I won't be as effective overall. This is something that I think is often undervalued by people just starting out in this field. There is so much to learn and so much to do to try and land a job; it feels like you're always playing catch-up. It's really difficult to justify spending any free time, at least for me, on anything besides learning to code. For a while, I felt like my whole life got out of balance, and I wasn't even spending enough time with my daughter. I've been able to correct that, after some introspection. After all, she and my fiancé are the whole reason I'm doing this in the first place; my end goal is to create a comfortable life for us. Still, we got our daughter down to bed around 7 tonight, and I got right back to work.

As I stated in the last couple of entries, I've started a new chapter in my learning journey, branching out to the world of React Native. While this still falls within the realm of React, there is a lot that is unique to React Native, and really a lot I need to learn overall. While most of the syntax is the same or similar, the elements that are built in to React Native are totally different than what is used in React, and instead of using regular HTML elements, there are specific elements for React Native that end up getting compiled down to IOS or Android code. With these specific elements, there are a ton of built-in props to learn, such as animations, specific functionality like onPress or visibility for a modal. I could take the approach of just reading through the docs, but I think the way I'm doing things right now is going to work out really well. The course I'm taking right now, Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide 2020 on Udemy, is a great introduction to React Native. The course itself is about 30 hours long, and covers a lot of ground. Most of the lectures are built around creating projects and demonstrating the code through these projects. In the first project, which I just finished up, we created a todo list, the most common tutorial app of all time. I think it's so common because there are so many things to demonstrate in a todo list, like creating a list, adding to it, deleting items, using text inputs and adding onPress events to buttons. We did all of these things, and he showed several ways to do some of them, which was really cool. Most of the functionality of these apps are handled in the exact same way as you would in a React app, but there is just different syntax to use for the elements and props. I can tell some things are going to come easy because I know React so well, and others are going to be brand new. I'm still really excited about the whole learning process, and can't wait to learn more.

Until tomorrow!