Speeding Through the Basics

It's a rainy Saturday afternoon down in here in Florida, which makes it somehow more relaxing. I haven't left the neighborhood for about 2 and a half weeks now, and surprisingly, I'm not really going stir-crazy. I think if I didn't have my studies to keep me occupied while the little girl is sleeping, I might be losing my mind, along with a healthy dose of Netflix. If I didn't have something to put my mind towards, it would be a lot more difficult hunkering down as we are. I could also be out of a job, and that would be really disparaging. Luckily, I have all of these things, and my family is still healthy. We've managed to social distance very effectively, and it seems as though we are successfully dodging this Coronavirus. Cases still haven't peaked, and I think here in Florida we could still be a ways off from seeing that peak, but as long as my family continues doing what we're doing, we should be ok. It's a crazy time in the world right now; this is unlike anything else I've ever gone through before, and I think there's still a lot of strangeness to come. I believe our economy is going to continue to take a big hit, not only in the United States, but worldwide, and I think the next year is going to be world-changing.

Anyways, as always on the weekend, I do my best to take advantage of my little girl's downtime, studying as much as I can. Over the last week and a half, I had been working on Jonas Schmedtmann's Advanced CSS and Sass. I learned a ton and really feel a lot more comfortable both with these advanced CSS features and Sass as a language. Now, we don't use Sass in my company, but my cohort and I talked about it. I don't think it's a direction we're going to go in down the road, but he agreed that it's a nice system and worth thinking about. I finished this course up on Thursday night and started a new course yesterday. I decided to stay in the realm of CSS and dive a little deeper while it's fresh in my mind. This job has made me realize how much I was depending on component libraries and skipping the fundamentals of CSS. Since we don't use any component libraries at work, I felt like my skills in this area were inadequate and I needed to step them up, and fast. Jonas' course was great and it was very helpful, but he jumps right into the deep end in this course. That's great and all, and I really don't need much work on the fundamentals, but there are things in the fundamentals I'm just a little shaky on. So, yesterday I started Maximilian Schwarzmueller's CSS - The Complete Guide.

This course is broken into 3 sections, or 3 tracks, as they call it. You can start from the beginning and get the introduction to CSS for beginners, or you can start in the advanced section in the middle, or you can skip right to the expert section. While I don't think I need too much help in the beginner area, I always like to take the entire course, without skipping anything. Usually, if I feel the material is somewhat redundant or less useful, I'll watch the course in 1.25 or 1.5 times the speed. Actually, lately I've been able to watch almost everything in 1.25X speed, and my brain has just adapted to this. This allows me to get through a lot more material in a shorter period of time, obviously. If I watch a 30 hour course at 1.25X speed, I can finish it in less than 25 hours and then focus my efforts on something else. Every instructor is different, though, and I've found it's impossible to keep up with certain instructors at this speed, Maximilian being one of them. So far, in the beginner section, I've been fine with this, but as we get into the more advanced topics, I will definitely be slowing down the playback to a more manageable pace. After finishing this course off, I have plans to take a React Native course by Stephen Grider, which will definitely help me in my next project at work. I'm looking forward to taking another one of his courses.

Until tomorrow!