Still Getting Me

As I stated yesterday, the last 2 days have been crazy at work. We had 2 tournaments yesterday, and then another large one this morning. On top of that, myself and 2 of my colleagues went to a Starbucks early this morning before work to plan out our ladies' golf clinic we held today. It was a long and hectic day, but I was also able to get off by 2 and spend some time with the family. We went out to eat at a local Mexican restaurant and then talked over Zoom with my parents to catch up. It's always nice to see them, but I think they're more interested in seeing their granddaughter than me, which I can understand. I'm happy to get past these last 2 days, but the fun doesn't stop there. In fact, I'm still in the first half of my work week. Tomorrow, I work 10 and a half hours, we're super busy, and I have 2 lessons, so it should be interesting. I think I only work 8 hours on Wednesday, but I round out the work week on Thursday with another 10 and a half hour shift, I believe. I was able to get some pretty good overtime this last week, so I'm not complaining, but it's definitely making it difficult to find the energy to study when I get home at night.

I'm still working on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy, and it's still wearing me out. I've talked about this exhaustively, but this has become the most challenging course I've taken on Udemy so far. I think the quality of the instruction is pretty high, but this is no place to start for a beginner to React Native. I feel pretty comfortable with React and JavaScript, and this is kicking my butt. If I wasn't as comfortable with either of these topics, I would be completely lost. As a matter of fact, looking back on some of the first few courses on React I took, this is how I felt. When I took Andrei Neagoie's course on React, I remember just following along with the code and having no idea what I was doing. In fact, this was in the early days of my blog, and if you're really curious, which I'm sure you aren't, you'll find documentation of my confusion during this course. I followed that course up with an equally difficult course by Neil Cummings and felt the exact same way. This was when I decided to go back to learning vanilla JavaScript and understanding the underlying concepts much better. It's not the same now. I understand the code, but there's just so much to learn. I expected React Native to be very similar to React, maybe just an extension of React, really. In a lot of ways it is; the underlying structure is the same and it looks identical to React. The problem is the amount of nuances that come with React Native. There are an abundance of things to learn about React Native and its components. There are unique props and configurations on packages that come along with React Native that can only be learned through a great amount of practice and instruction, in my opinion.

With that, I finished up the 4 plus hour section on React Navigation, and had a heck of a time with it. Again, the material itself wasn't overly difficult; there's just a lot to learn, like a whole lot. The app we built is actually really nice. It's just a simple recipes app, but it has three different ways to navigate, using a stack, tabs, and a drawer. The look of the app is awesome, and I really hope we go over how to get it to production so I can find a way to show it off. I'm a long way off from being able to build my own React Native apps, but I'm a lot closer than I was a week ago. After completing this lengthy section, we moved to my nemesis: Redux. Redux, since the first day I looked at it, has been a problem for me. I understand it much better than I did, in large thanks to Stephen Grider's material on the topic, but I still don't grasp it fully. Max is using the hooks that are built in to the Redux package, which I haven't yet been introduced to in any of my tutorials. Actually, while this is yet another thing to learn, I believe these hooks will end up simplifying the Redux code to a large degree and make it easier for me to understand. Still, Max is moving so quickly, I'm getting to the point where I just can't absorb this much information. I don't want to go into the mode of just copying whatever he's writing, so I'm trying to monitor myself to make sure I don't get overloaded. If I get to the point where I feel like I'm not learning anything anymore, I shut it down. This is making for a longer overall process, but the quality of my learning time is much higher.

Until tomorrow!