Getting to the Hard Stuff

I've come to the end of my first real weekend, and I have to say, it's been one of my best weekends in a while, despite the turmoil going on in the world right now. Yes, the grocery stores are completely ransacked and the threat of massive shutdowns nationwide loom, but it's still business as usual otherwise. We stayed in today and most of yesterday, other than making a run to the grocery store to scrounge up what I could find, but right now it's best to avoid contact with anyone else at all costs. If I could, I would certainly be working from home right now and for the foreseeable future, and really, it wouldn't be that difficult to transition to working from home in this position. We have the technologies set up on our work computers to be able to do so, we would just need to install those same tools onto our home computers. We have an instant messaging system, a video chat system, and a Scrum project management system. All of the projects are available through Github, so it wouldn't be that crazy to get all set up to take it home. In fact, I would wager I could get completely set up to work from home in the matter of a couple hours. I think people are being really shortsighted right now in not looking at the writing on the wall; our company should have already been preparing for this inevitability.

But, back to the nice weekend. Instead of spending at least half of my weekend feeling completely drained of energy and recuperating from the week that just ran me over, I felt energized and ready for anything. I was able to get a lot more done around the house and spend a lot more quality time with my daughter. It's been my habit lately to take a nap while she naps on my day off, but I didn't feel the need to do this at all. So, instead, I took that time to study and really get down to business. Lately, I haven't even had the energy to cook a decent meal and have been eating out way too much, and especially with the added human contact this implies, I wanted to avoid this going forward at all costs. I had plenty of energy to cook a good meal the last 2 nights, and it didn't feel like it was a chore. Overall, life was much more enjoyable this weekend, and I just felt like I could take the time to soak it in, instead of just trying to recover. Going forward, I suspect I'll have much more energy in the coming weeks during and after work, and my productivity will likely keep going up. This week, I was still recovering both from the time change last Saturday night and the crazy last week of work I just had at my other job. This week, I have no excuses.

As far as what I spent my time studying on, I've decided to devote all of my study time to working on Andrew Mead's The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp on Udemy. I'm about 60% done with the course, and I would love to finish it in the next week so I can feel comfortable moving on to something more focused on React. I'm definitely getting useful information from this course, and it's a great course on JavaScript, but my time would be better spent focusing solely on React and getting more into that mindset. We are doing some pretty advanced stuff with the project I'm working on at work in React, and it's right above my comfort level. This is good and bad; at this point, I would like to be able to prove my worth by knocking a project out of the park in a timely manner, but it's good to be pushing myself outside of my comfort zone and learning more every day. In the JavaScript course I'm working on, we are covering some advanced object-oriented programming right now, another one of the uncomfortable areas for me. This was something I struggled with the first couple times around, but every time I learn about it, it seems to make a little more sense. We are creating a Hangman game using an object as the game, and it's a great way to learn these topics. The challenges, as always are pushing me to think on my own, instead of just rote copying of the instructor's code. Andrew has a React course I really want to take, but he's in the process of revamping it right now, and the new version hasn't been released yet. I don't think it will be worth taking until he does.

Until tomorrow!