Getting the Hang of it

With the Coronavirus wreaking havoc on our daily lives, Easter just doesn't seem the same. This isn't usually a holiday we spend with extended family unless we're lucky, but it still just feels different. It's definitely one where we go all out and cook a big holiday meal, like a ham or a turkey with all the sides. However, this year, we don't have the option to shop on a whim. First of all, the grocery stores don't have everything we want; most of the shelves are picked through and we can't always get what we came for. Secondly, we're really trying to limit our trips out of the house as much as possible. Actually, I stopped going into work 2 Thursdays ago and haven't left the apartment complex since. We aren't too concerned about getting the virus ourselves, although I'm sure we don't want it, but more so that we don't want our little girl to get sick. Even though it doesn't seem to affect children as severely, we don't want to have to fight our way through a hospital right now to get the care we need. I'm concerned the little daredevil is going to get hurt in some other way and we'll have to make a trip to the hospital, which I think is a very risky move right now. So far, we've dodged any disasters and everyone is thankfully very healthy.

As I was talking about yesterday, while weekends are meant to catch up on some rest and do some relaxing, I also take full advantage of the time I have. While the little girl is awake, of course I spend my time with her, first and foremost. They grow up way too fast, and I don't want to miss a single second. But, as soon as she's out for either a nap or for the night, I get right to work. This means I can usually get about 2 hours of work done during her nap and at least a couple more at night, depending on how I feel. Given the situation in the world and the fact that I'm working from home, though, I'm also taking time to unplug and take care of myself a little bit. This means that I end my night with an hour or so of watching Netflix or Amazon. I think it's important for me to keep up this streak of studying to have some time to unwind every day, some time where I'm not thinking about coding and I can just really relax. You hear people talk about burnout all the time in this industry, and I can totally see why. As a developer, it's important to always keep learning, and you can't really just get to a point where you know what you need to know, and that's it. There are always new trends and technologies to learn. For a person like me who's trying to catch up to everyone else, there's still a lot I need to learn to get to a good baseline before I even start to look at the new trends and technologies. To avoid burnout, though, these sessions of binge-watching are important for me.

So far, I've had a really productive weekend. I'm writing this during the little girl's naptime after putting in a couple hours of studying, and like I said, I'll still get a couple more in later on tonight. I'm almost smack dab in the middle of Jonas Schmedtmann's Advanced CSS and Sass course on Udemy, a 28-hour course covering all of the high-end topics of CSS and the syntax of Sass. Since my last entry, I've been working on finishing up the first major project and adding responsiveness to it. Now, this project purposefully did not use flexbox or grid, as those will each be covered in the next 2 projects, respectively. As you may or may not know, flexbox and grid can both make life a lot easier when talking about responsiveness, so doing it without those technologies is an extra challenge. I had just used media queries in my work project on Friday, making my check component fully responsive, which was really one of the first times I had implemented something like this into a project I had built. Most of the projects I had built on my own implemented component libraries, which typically come responsive right out of the box, or are very easy to implement responsiveness. So, I learned a lot about this on Friday in doing my work, but went a lot deeper yesterday and today with the course. It's actually not nearly as daunting as I thought it would be, and I have to say, Sass makes it a lot easier. In fact, Sass makes a lot of things a lot easier, if you know how to work with it. That may be something to consider at work going forward.

Until tomorrow!