A New Chapter Begins

I said in my post yesterday that I was going to finish up Stephen Grider's Modern React with Redux course on Udemy last night, but it didn't end up happening. It turned out that the last couple of sections were less engaging than I thought they were going to be, and I just couldn't do it anymore. I got in about 5 hours of work yesterday, but just couldn't make it for that last hour. Nevertheless, I finished these last 2 sections up this morning and put the course to bed. This was an excellent course on React, and I would even venture to say it was the most informative of all the courses I've taken on React up to this point. I get asked quite a bit through Twitter what courses I recommend to take for a variety of things, like when just starting out, for React, or for CSS, and I always try to give the most thoughtful answer I can. I think it's important to understand that what works for me might not work for someone else and vice versa. Half of the battle of learning to code is figuring out how you as an individual learns best. Some people learn really well from reading a book, others from tutorials, and others from just building projects and googling when they get stuck. All of these options are completely viable, and I wouldn't tell someone not to do it in a certain way just because it doesn't work for me. I've found, after a lot of trial and error, there are several ways I learn well, but the most productive has been through video tutorials, as well as coding challenges like CodeWars and FreeCodeCamp. To round out my point, if someone were to ask me where to start with React, I think I would likely tell them to start with Stephen's course, reinforce those ideas with Colt Steele's React course, and then move on to Andrei Neagoie's React course. I think I liked Andrei's course the best, but it is super advanced, and they don't stop to explain anything; definitely not where you want to start.

After completing this course, I entered into no-man's-land. This is one of the most difficult and exciting parts of learning to code: choosing the next resource to consume. My thoughts recently had been to continue on with Stephen Grider's coursework in his advanced React and Redux course. After 30 plus hours of listening to his voice, and actually another 25 or 30 hours directly before this course in the second half of The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp, I decided I needed a break from him. I've been raving about his teaching style for the past month now, and I'm not backing down from that position. It is my opinion that, out of all the instructors I've taken courses from on Udemy, his teaching style and breadth of knowledge are the best for my ear. However, there are some great options out there. Colt Steele, of course, is always great, but I really only have one more course of his that I want to take at this time, and that's his algorithms and data structures course, which I wasn't excited about in the least at the time. There's also Andrei Neagoie's courses, of which I've only taken a couple so far: his React course and his JavaScript course. I think there's some nice value in his courses, but his teaching style really isn't the best for me. One I hadn't thought about for a while was Maximilian Schwarzmüller, who has quite a variety of courses on all sorts of topics. I've taken his Vue course and watched several of his videos on Youtube, but I've never really given him much time.

Instead of looking for a specific teacher, though, I was looking for a topic to learn. Outside of Stephen Grider's advanced React course, there aren't any other React courses on Udemy I'm really interested in taking, given I'm comfortable with the fundamentals of React and really only need to get the advanced topics and Redux down at this point. I started looking at NodeJS, and saw some great options for that. My Node skills are sub-par right now, and I need to dive a lot deeper on this topic. I was just about to buy a course by Andrew Mead, another one of my favorite instructors, when I saw a course on React Native. I had totally forgotten about React Native. For a while now, I've wanted to get into React Native, but just have never found the time to switch gears and get into it. There are a ton of jobs right now for React Native developers and I think this could be something that is just beginning to be really popular. There is a lot of opportunity for growth, and it's still in the early stages. I thought, what better time than now to pick up a new technology? I've just reached a new peak with React, my JavaScript skills are pretty solid; I think it's time for expansion. I started looking at courses, and there are a ton of options. Stephen, of course, has a great course on React Native, but again, I needed a break from him. The bestselling course on Udemy for React Native was Maximilian Schwarzmüller's, so I pulled the trigger. For the last couple of hours, I've been going through the first section, setting up my development environment by installing Android Studio and XCode, as well as the Expo CLI. I'm almost there, and then it's on to a new frontier. Given that I've been less motivated than usual lately, I think this is just the shot in the arm I needed.

Until tomorrow!