Working All Angles

Today, I worked on three different things and broke up the day nicely. First off, I met with my aunt and uncle to discuss their website I've been working on for the last couple of weeks and revealed what I had so far. They didn't jump for joy or anything, but I didn't expect them to. I think overall they liked it, but are going to have some things they want to change. The biggest thing they took issue with was the portfolio page. Their old website had a very basic grid system of images for the portfolio with the images being really small. The grid was a very symmetrical 3 column, 4 row grid and was, to put it lightly, kind of boring. I added a lot of asymmetry to the portfolio and had on the top row one standalone, larger item that I thought would be their showcase portfolio item. They didn't like that approach as much as I thought, which is totally fine. From this point, I'll let them decide what design they want for that and other parts of the site and I will mold what I have into that. I never claimed to be a web designer and certainly don't take issue with the criticism. In fact, I'm glad they felt comfortable enough to voice their opinion. The most important thing is that they come away from this feeling like they got what they wanted with the website and it looks the way they want. I was also finally able to tackle the carousel jumbotron on the homepage, but the image load time when deployed was horrendous and the images aren't responsive, so I'm going to have to either tweak it or use some other type of package for this.

I did all of that while my little girl napped, and after we got her down for the night, I got to work on Stephen Grider's Modern React with Redux course on Udemy. I knocked out another section in this course that introduced the use of Redux Thunks. I've used Thunks in other tutorials, but it's never been explained in as much depth as it was in this course. Basically, thunks are used to allow the developer to return a function within the action creator instead of just a plain object. This opens up the possibility of using asynchronicity in the action creator. Anytime you use an outside API, this becomes necessary. If you call an API, it will take time for that data to come back from the API, and in the meantime, Redux will run and do its thing, finishing before the API has brought back the data. If the function is marked as asynchronous, it will wait until completion before rendering, allowing us to use that data. Implementing Redux Thunks are incredibly easy; all it is just a few extra lines of setup when creating the store for Redux. All it takes is passing in the applyMiddleware function to the createStore as an argument and giving it the argument of thunk. That's it. In fact, the source code itself for Redux Thunks is less than 20 lines long, but it really opens up some possibilities when using Redux.

After finishing up that section, I decided to get some more job applications in. It may not be the best time to do that, given it's Friday night and most people won't be looking at their email until Monday morning, but I felt compelled. I've been getting really negative lately about the job search and I have to work to turn that around. It's really difficult to find a job as a junior developer, contrary to popular belief. When I first started down this road, I was told by everyone there was a plethora of jobs out there and I'll be set for life. It is true that there are a lot of software engineering jobs out there, but very few companies want to hire a junior developer given the investment they have to put in and the return they might not get. It's common these days for juniors to turn around after 6 months or a year and find other employment with their newfound skills, leaving their initial employer in the lurch. This is the nature of the industry, but it sure makes it an uphill battle to break in. I've been going through a list of companies that hire remotely on Github and firing off applications to any of them that are hiring for front end developers with JavaScript and React skills. Tonight, I probably applied at about 15 companies. Everyone says it's a numbers game when first trying to break in, and I'm definitely treating it as such. My application count is definitely in the 3-digit category at this point.

Until tomorrow!