Learning New Things

It's the start of my three day weekend, and I am pumped. As I said yesterday, I haven't had a real long weekend in quite a while. For a while at the golf course I was working at, we were able to cut down to 4 days a week of working longer hours to have 3 day weekends, and while that was awesome, it doesn't feel the same as having an actual holiday off like most people working non-service jobs do. I didn't mind having my weekends during the middle of the week when I worked in the service industry, but having weekends when everybody else does just seems a lot more legitimate. I could get used to this. To start the weekend off right, I woke up pretty early, got the little girl fed, and took her over to the pool. Because it was so early, there was only one other person there, which was awesome because I'm super paranoid about being around crowds of people during the pandemic. As soon as we got there, she decided to run right down the steps into the pool and took a nose-dive right in. She's not even 2 yet, so this is not something she's ready to do. I picked her up out of the water and she was a little shocked. She shook it off pretty quickly, and we ended up having an awesome time. She loves the water, be it the pool, ocean, ponds(which we definitely don't swim in), or even the fountain in front of our complex(which we also don't swim in).

I wanted to take a moment to talk about staying up with the industry. In this industry, it's important to stay on top of the trends. If you decide to go into this career with the knowledge you have and not expand on that knowledge throughout your career, you will be way behind within a matter of a year or 2. JavaScript is constantly changing, React is evolving, and the list of technologies grows on a daily basis. It's easy enough to get a general understanding of what it is you need to know and stay on top of, but how do you find out what is trending in the business and what you should be learning next? For me, I use 2 sources of information and consume them constantly: newsletters and podcasts. I have subscribed to newsletters about all kinds of things in the industry, including CSS, JavaScript, Node, React, mobile development, and so much more. I get newsletters from individuals on these topics, as well as from companies like Smashing Magazine who make it their business to publish information. Whenever I can, I go through these emails and find any little tidbits to give me a general idea of what's going on in the world. When I'm at work, I have podcasts going constantly. I have a list of about 20 podcasts that I subscribe to, some are better or more relevant than others, but I've been able to get a really good feel for what's coming up next from listening to these. Most of the time, I'm so focused on my work, I'm barely listening to the podcast, but sometimes they really draw me in.

I've been working hard on this microservices course by Stephen Grider and, out of the 45 total hours in the course, I think I only have about 20 left. There is so many interesting topics and tools we are covering, I could imagine spending another 100 hours going into further depth, and likely will in the near future. These are all topics I may not be using in my daily work on the job, but I would like to be more versed in for future positions. Learning about Docker and Kubernetes is hard, but the people that know this stuff and work with it in their jobs make really good money because of how hard it is, and I think they get to do some really interesting stuff. Today, I learned how to publish a package to NPM. I'd never done this before, and it was surprisingly easy. We took some of the code we had written in the authentication microservice and transferred it into a common folder to use across other microservices. The files we transferred mostly involved error handling and middlewares that would be relevant to other microservices. Once we published it, we installed it to the authentication microservice and imported the appropriate modules to the files that were using them. I was amazed at how simple it was, and it's really giving me some ideas for what else I could possibly publish. I've been thinking of some things I could contribute to the community, and this might be the seed for that idea to grow.

Until tomorrow!