Amazing Tool

I had another day off with my little girl today, and it was really nice getting to hang out with her all day. A lot of the day was spent cleaning up around the house, but besides that, we played quite a bit and just hung out. I've been sick for the last week and the week before that, my fiancé was sick, so between the two of us, we've let the house get a little messier than it should, so I've spent the last 2 days folding laundry, doing dishes, putting toys away, and generally tidying up. It's still pretty messy, but it's a lot better than what it was. My little girl is really interested in being outside right now and, when you take her outside, she throws a fit when it's time to come inside. She has a little plastic bike that she likes to ride around and also a stroller for her doll, and we take walks around the neighborhood. Somehow, her doll lost an arm recently, so it must look strange with her pushing around a doll with only one arm, but she doesn't seem to mind. She's waking up early these days, around 6:30 or 7, but she's taking naps for nearly 4 hours, so I'm able to get a little work done and take a nap myself while she's down, so it works out good. I spent the morning cleaning up, got some work done, napped, and then when she got up, we went to the store and grabbed a pizza for dinner. Then, at 6:30, she started winding down for bed and I got back to work.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I am absolutely loving Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy. As opposed to the last course I took by Maximilian Schwarzmüeller, I'm learning at a speed that is super comfortable and I feel like I'm taking everything in on a much deeper level than I've done for any other course on Udemy. Udemy is great and it serves a wonderful purpose. I've learned a ton from courses on Udemy and would recommend it to others in a heartbeat. Certain instructors are better than others, but almost all of the courses I've come across have the same thing in common that is a common shortcoming for tutorials in this field: they teach by code-alongs. I love a good code-along; they're fun and you get to build something cool in the process. You get introduced to loads of tools and technologies that you might not otherwise use and sometimes, this is the best way to learn these new tools. However, the big issue with code-alongs is that you rarely come across an issue where you have to problem-solve your way out of it. All of the problem solving is done for you, and I think this is really where the deep learning comes into play. With Andrew's course, and his other courses as well, he includes a ton of short challenges where you are forced into problem solving your way through an issue. You have to actually stop the video and figure it out on your own, which is absolutely pivotal, I think. I would love to find other instructors that do the same thing, but on Udemy, he is the only one that follows this model that I've found so far.

Yesterday, I finished up the basics section of the course, and have now moved on to a section focused solely on integrating Prisma into the project. There was quite a bit of setup involved, but once we got past that, I saw the true power of Prisma. We are still sticking with our same blog project for this section, so we set up an initial type for users, posts, and comments. This, in all, was about 15 or so lines of code. From there, Prisma sets up all of the mutations and then some that we did in Node automatically. In other words, Prisma creates mutations for creating, updating, and deleting users, posts, and comments without having to actually do anything other than some basic configuration. With a little more configuration, we were able to link back to the code we wrote in Node and use that as well, but it's really unbelievable how useful Prisma is. Once you get good with it, you could set up a full-blown project in a matter of a couple hours and have all kinds of mutations, queries, and subscriptions without having to write anything. I realized during all of this, that I really like GraphQL and the way it works makes a lot of sense for my brain. I think GraphQL is going to continue on an upward trend, and I'm seriously considering devoting a lot more time to this area of expertise. Creating user interfaces with React is awesome, don't get me wrong, but I'm beginning to wonder if I may feel more at home in this realm than I do in building UIs. It may be a fleeting thought, but it's something to ponder.

Until tomorrow!