What's the next move?

I've had a difficult time trying to come up with an idea for the next website I would like to make; there are plenty of things I can think of doing, but I want more practice in using an API, along with implementing hooks in my codebase. So, in the meantime, I decided to start Steve Kinney's "State Management with Redux and MobX" on Frontend Masters. It's a pretty good course, focusing mainly so far on Redux, which I definitely need to study more on. For whatever reason, the workflow for this technology just doesn't make any sense to me. It comes down to being quite a bit of boilerplate, and I suppose after doing it a few times, it would become pretty easy. In the end, it's really only about 5 functions within Redux, but typically these are set up over several files, and it ends up looking a lot more complicated than that. I'm about 3 hours into this course, so I'll either spend the rest of the night finishing that up or start a new project.

I just came across an API for video games, which has some great content it calls, including a high-quality image and several videos. I have some ideas as to what I'm going to do with this information, but nothing seems too original at this point. I know that I need to work on handling state in an app, either with redux or without. Having some sort of search function would be a useful way to practice this skill, and I could definitely implement that within this app somehow. I would also like to work on some way to use Firebase or the like, but I have no idea how I would go about doing that with this API. I may need to go back to the drawing board on this one and come up with something more inventive.

I had an interview earlier today with a company that uses bluetooth mesh to create lighting systems within homes and businesses, so I spent a considerable amount of time learning about that technology and the underlying code this morning and last night. It's a really interesting topic that's going to become incredibly popular in the coming years, and they're on the cutting edge. The code for bluetooth mesh is written in Java and the company uses Swift to build Android apps to interact with the network. After looking at some of the code, it looked almost exactly like object-oriented programming in JavaScript with a few small differences in syntax. Each element within the network, like a lightbulb, are treated as objects with state, like on or off. There's a library of functions used to interact with these objects that essentially change the state of the object. While complex in nature, the code is fairly straightforward. However, I don't think the interview went that well. In the technical part of the interview, the developer they pulled in asked if I had used Swift before, and I answered honestly that I had not. After that, he seemed like he didn't have many other questions for me. That was kind of the show stopper. Up until that point, everything seemed to be going decently, although I was fairly nervous and felt like I was repeating myself quite a bit. No matter, though, there's too much to do to dwell on a rejection!

Until tomorrow!