Taking advantage of the time
Since I broke my leg on Thursday, I've been given the gift of time. I could squander this away and watch Netflix in a Vicodin-induced stupor or capitalize on the opportunity. So far, I'm taking full advantage of the situation and coding from morning to night. I've made more progress in the last 4 days than I have in the previous month. There are limitations, however. Because of the drugs I'm on for pain, my concentration levels aren't necessarily the best, so I've struggled with doing any of the CodeWars challenges. Instead, I've focused solely on creating projects. I finished up my portfolio yesterday and moved on. There are still some things I would like to come back to on the portfolio, and some of these things are beyond my current skill level, but for now I'm pretty satisfied. If I finish a new course, project, or want to add a skill to the portfolio, it only requires about 4 or 5 lines of code to insert it. I love how I wrote the code, and may go back to refactor it a bit more, but I think any employer would be impressed with the code written in this project.
Yesterday, I decided to check out a course on Gatsby, called "Introduction to Gatsby," by Jason Lengstorf. This course centered around building a blog from scratch using Gatsby with MDX and GraphQL. I've always been intrigued yet somewhat intimidated by Gatsby, so I figured this was a good place to start. Jason is a great instructor and I really enjoyed the course and I found myself at the end of the course by the end of last night. I took this morning to change up the blog to have my own content in there and turn it into a home for technical blog entries, which I would really like to write at some point. I then added the skill of Gatsby, the course, and the project to my portfolio, and like I said, I maybe only added about 12 or 13 lines of code total. This course left me wanting more in the way of Gatsby, so I started to take a course by him in Frontend Masters called "Intermediate Gatsby," but it hasn't been edited yet and I ran into some technical issues within the course about 45 minutes in. I decided I would wait until they've published the edited version and give it another try, but I know he has a lot of content on Youtube, so I might see if I can find something on there later on.
After abandoning that course, I decided I would start a project using the Star Wars API. This project is fairly simple, containing 7 total pages and calling the API in different ways to render different subjects, like the characters, planets, and films. I used Semantic UI again for styling because I really like this styling framework, but for my next project, I think I'm going to try something else like Bootstrap or Material UI. I ran into a few snags along the way in this project, but I powered through. I do have some issues with it that may go unresolved, as the app functions fine as is. For example, I have 6 different places where my state lives(!), but like I said, it works perfectly fine so I'm not going to mess with it. I am having an issue with the navigation bar at the moment, where it renders what I want when I'm on the homepage, but on the other pages, I can't quite get it to work. I'll have to take a closer look at this and see if I can fix it. This will give me something to do to wrap up my day, but overall it was pretty productive!
Until tomorrow!
