Work getting in the way of learning

After a 13 hour shift out in the sun today, I've come home to try and get some studying in before crashing, but it appears my order of operations is out of sync. I made it about 20 minutes into my session before I started to pass out. I was able to recover and gain a temporary second-wind, but that didn't last. I'm hoping that writing this while listening to some music will give me some energy to keep going for a while, but I think the night will be short-lived regardless. I'm really looking forward to spend my working hours advancing my knowledge base and writing code. As of now, I'm wasting countless hours and massive amounts of energy at my job while coding takes a back seat. Obviously, there isn't an option when it comes to this because my family depends on my income, but it definitely puts the imperative on finding a developer job as soon as possible.

Today, I started Andrei Neagoie's "Advanced JavaScript Concepts" on Udemy, but as of now, I'm only about halfway done with the second section. I've decided to put Neil Cummings' "Build an app with React, Redux, and Firestore from scratch" on hold for a couple of valid reasons. First, I had an interview with a company yesterday and, if I passed this interview, the next step will be a technical interview focused on JavaScript. I need to learn as much as I can to fill in my massive knowledge gaps when it comes to JavaScript in a short period of time. I could have this technical interview as early as the beginning of next week or it could take weeks. I didn't feel very confident about the initial interview, so it's highly possible that it never happens at all. Regardless, I want to be as prepared as I can. The second reason why I put Neil's course on hold is because I was starting to feel way out of my league. I was able to follow along, but a lot of the material started to seem completely foreign to me. There were some incredibly complex concepts introduced in this course that I just couldn't comprehend with my current state of knowledge. I think the only way I can grasp these concepts is to better understand the intricacies of JavaScript. Andrei Neagoie has a way of explaining concepts as though he's speaking to a 5-year-old, which is how I feel when it comes to JavaScript sometimes.

So far in this course, we are exploring the inner workings of JavaScript and how things work under the hood. While none of this is necessary to understand when writing JavaScript, it helps to know why things work the way they do. This will give me that more complete understanding of JavaScript, which is exactly what I need. I can already tell in the 25 hours this course spans, I will have a much firmer grasp on the entire picture that is JavaScript. There is a lot to know in JavaScript, but it appears that Andrei goes into great depth on a lot of different facets regarding the language. This section and the next build the foundation of JavaScript and from there, we start to break down the individual concepts to dive deeper. There are plenty of exercises along the way to practice these concepts, but unlike other courses I've taken, I won't be producing any projects or apps to show off. This is fine; I've already built a solid list of projects displayed on Github and deployed to Netlify(mainly). Now, I need to start feeling more comfortable in creating my own projects without the aid of a tutorial, and the only way that can happen is if I become fluent in JavaScript. I trust this course will help me achieve this goal.

Until tomorrow!