Coursework on Pause

I've consumed a ton of content in the last year. On Thursday, I finished up a 54 hour course on microservices, by Stephen Grider, one of the longest courses I've ever taken. Taking courses is a great way to learn, and I can attribute most of the base knowledge I've gained from these course I've taken. However, I will say, in the last 3 months working hands-on in enterprise-level projects, my knowledge has expanded faster than it ever did when I was strictly taking courses. I wouldn't be able to work on the stuff that I have in my job if it weren't for the underlying knowledge I already had, but building things, I think, is the best way to truly learn something. I have a list of projects on my portfolio that I've created, and I think this is a valuable asset. However, a lot of these projects were built during an online course, not on my own. There are quite a few that I built on my own, and these are displayed more prominently. I have gone back to look at a couple of these projects and found they are now broken, though, either by the API changing or by some kind of dependency update handled automatically by Github.

I could go back and work on fixing these projects, which I probably should, but I think I want to just build something new. I have some ideas that have been floating around in my head for quite some time, but I'm struggling with where to start. One project I really want to build is similar to Meetup, and I discussed this a long time ago. I think developers need a space where they can build a team with other like-minded developers and create projects on that team. They would come on to the platform, start a group and have other developers join the team. They may be a frontend developer and request a backend developer, database developer, a designer, and maybe another frontend developer. They could create the team however they want. There may be some projects with outlines already created to give them a starting point, or maybe this would be part of the process, for them to come up with something together. Then, they would all come together for meetings either locally or, probably more appropriately, over a video-conferencing tool. One of the biggest struggles in breaking into this industry is having no experience where experience is required everywhere. This would give these developers an outlet to be able to gain that experience and build a project they could deploy and show on their own portfolios.

I've thought a lot about this project, and I think I'm close to starting it. It's extensive, though. You would need to create an authentication system, a database of users and events, a chat application, and maybe even integrate a video-conferencing tool. On the frontend, it would be really complicated, as well. I think I could manage most of the frontend work that would go into it, but the backend work would be a stretch. I think before I start this, I'm going to ease myself back into project-building mode by working on an API-oriented project. There's an API that pulls information about superheroes that I've been looking at for a while. I would like to have the list populate on the first page, or maybe just an appended list of the more famous superheroes, with a search function at the top. I would have the API get called after a delay of them entering keys into the search result. I think it would also be cool to have some different tabs, where you could view lists of superheroes with certain subjects in common. For example, you might have a villains tab, or Marvel superheroes, or DC Comics superheroes, or just female superheroes. There are a lot of ways to go with this, but the API returns a lot of information, so I'll be able to do quite a bit with it.

Until tomorrow!