Needing to Switch Gears

Today was a long, long day at work. Every month, we have a tournament for our members where they can bring guests out and play. Since I've gotten there, we've gone from having about 80 players every month in this tournament to now having around 125 players on busy months. We had 123 players today, which is pretty much our maximum capacity. It's a crazy day that is jam-packed with stuff to do from the time I get in the door to the very last moment I'm there. We started setting up the tournament yesterday and spent every minute we could getting it all ready to go, put the finishing touches on it before it went off today at 1, and then spent the time they were out on the course getting ready for them to get in. After they get in, we make a mad dash to score the tournament as fast as possible and then get up to the dinner festivities to announce the winners. It's a lot of fun for the members, and they really enjoy it. After I leave, I would love to come back and play in it at some point; I think it would be a lot of fun to be on the other side of things. We do a really good job running tournaments, and we've gotten into a great groove with them. In the last year, I've taken over a lot of the responsibilities in tournaments, and I think there will be a serious scramble to fill that void, but I'm confident my co-workers will rise to the challenge of it.

Yesterday, if you're not up to speed on the blog, I announced that I have accepted a position as a Software Developer at a local company. I was happy about it, but not over the moon. It's been such a long journey to get to where I'm at, and it almost felt surreal that I had finally reached a huge milestone in this journey. Being able to spend my days learning and growing my skillset while applying it to real-world projects is going to be a huge upgrade for me, and my learning curve is going to go through the roof. There will be some growing pains, for sure, and I already feel the imposter syndrome, to a certain extent. After having a night to sleep on it, I woke up this morning feeling like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It still doesn't feel completely real, and I've had a lot of thoughts about different ways in which my life is going to change in the coming months. It's going to be an awesome new chapter in my journey, and I'm really excited to get going on it. Before I step through those doors, though, I have a lot of preparation to get ready. Right now, I'm taking a course on GraphQL, which I absolutely love, but is not going to be applicable at all to what I'm doing unless I can convince them that they should adopt GraphQL, which would be a pretty difficult sell from the new guy on the block.

I would like to finish up Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp, but if it's not going to be something I'm using in my daily practices, I probably won't retain the knowledge I'm accruing. It sounds like my position is going to be pretty JavaScript-heavy and focused on the front end, so I think I should turn my focus onto going deeper with JavaScript and brushing up on the tougher concepts of the language. I've taken countless hours of coursework on JavaScript, but I am really interested in a couple of courses on Udemy: Andrew Mead's JavaScript course and Understanding the Weird Parts, which gets great reviews. I think if I can knock those 2 courses out before starting, I should feel pretty good about coming in on the first day. Also, I started Wes Bos' JavaScript 30 a while back, but never finished it. I think I could knock out the projects in this course in a matter of a few days and gain some awesome knowledge from this. It sounds like React will be a part of my job description, but I've taken a few courses recently in this area and feel pretty good with it right now. Across their stack, they are using some things I'm not well-versed in at all, but I might not get much exposure to until later on in my tenure there. They are using a SQL database, so at some point, I'm going to need to learn all about this, and they're using .NET on the backend. I would love to learn this stuff, but again, I think this can wait. The main key is to feel as confident and comfortable as possible with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS on day 1 as I can.

Until tomorrow!