Calm Before the Storm

I had to work pretty much all day today and didn't get home until about 6, so my time spent studying was somewhat limited. Now that we are in January, this is when the golf season in Florida really heats up. Things will be quite different than they were all Summer and most of the Fall for me; instead of having plenty of time to work on my studies, I will be grinding it out at work, going from one tournament to the next. The days are taxing mentally dealing with all of our members pulling me from one direction to the next, all the while trying to plan for upcoming and ongoing events. Today, I worked for about 10 and a half hours, but it was a long 10 and a half hours. When the golf course is full and we have busy days, which is pretty much every day during the season, I barely find time to eat and stay occupied from the time I clock in until I leave. It gets a little overwhelming sometimes, and by the end of the day, it's difficult to find the energy to do anything else other than recuperate and get ready for the next day. The sooner I can get out of the golf business and focus my efforts on honing my software development skills, the better off I'll be.

Nonetheless, as soon as we got our little girl down for bed and the docket was clear, I got down to some work. I've been working through Stephen Grider's Modern React with Redux course for the last week. Last night, we finished up a medium-sized project that spanned about 6 or 7 sections of the course. In this project, we used the API from Unsplash and created a search function to render a grid of images from their database given the search query. I got a lot more comfortable using Axios in this project, and really like it compared to using fetch. The way Axios structures the function to call the API is really nice and clean and makes a lot of sense. When looking back at the code a few weeks from now, I would be able to understand exactly what I needed to do to make a change to the functionality. Fetch is awesome in that it is built in to JavaScript, but I think the preferred way to call an API, for me at least, is definitely Axios. We also did some work with the grid system in this project. Most of the CSS being used in this course comes directly from Semantic UI, but in this project, we created our own grid and manipulated it with regular old CSS. I've taken a couple courses on flexbox and the grid system, but it's been a while. After messing around in this project with it, it's clear to me that I need to do some more work in this area and really master these skills. I still haven't done a deep dive on CSS and I think it's really important to have a strong understanding of it if I want to land a good frontend or UI developer position.

Creating search functions has always been something that I viewed as being a little bit beyond my scope of capabilities. Any time I tried to create something with a search function, I ended feeling like I was in over my head. I could look up some examples of how to do it online and maybe copy and paste what I need, but I had a hard time getting that information to sink in. The way we created the search functionality in this project was simple, and it made so much sense. I feel like I could implement this in other projects and it wouldn't be an issue at all. After completing this project, we moved on to another, similar project using the Youtube API. In this project, we created another search box that brings up relevant Youtube videos on whatever was searched for. We are now in the process of creating a similar kind of grid to display the thumbnails for these videos, and will eventually have a position on the screen meant to display the video that the user wants to watch. This whole project is meant to reinforce everything we've gone over so far with React before moving on to Redux, my dreaded enemy. I've taken several courses on Redux and still struggle to wrap my head around the entire idea. I trust that Stephen is going to do a great job at presenting the ideas, and I have confidence that things are finally going to start clicking for me with Redux. If I can master this skill, I think I will have a big leg up on the competition and will have a really nice feather in my hat going forward.

Until tomorrow!