Weekend Work

Well, it's the weekend, and for me that doesn't mean I necessarily take a break. Sure, I'm not on a set 8-hour work schedule, but I still study around 4 or 5 hours each day on my weekends. In fact, since May 26th of last year, I haven't missed a single day of studying. I'm coming up quickly on a year straight of good study habits and starting my journey in coding, and it has been a wild ride. I was discussing this with my parents earlier today, and just reflecting on where I was this date last year and my expectations when I entered into this quest are a stark difference from where I am today. A year ago today, I don't think I had even considered the idea of getting into coding. I had definitely thought about it before May 26th last year, but it really wasn't on my radar, until it just was. I don't know exactly what happened to get me started going down that road, but it certainly grabbed ahold of me. When I first started, I had no idea what to expect. I thought I could learn a language in a month or so and I would probably be set. Maybe I would need to learn a couple languages, but how hard could it be? Nearly a year later, and I feel like I've just recently moved into the category of being an intermediate level JavaScript developer. Not even a good one. I have moments where I feel somewhat competent, but I'm quickly humbled.

A month into my studies, I had a list of everything I thought I needed to learn, and it was extensive. I knew at that point I needed to learn JavaScript, HTML and CSS, but I also thought I needed to learn everything else there was to know in the realm of software development. And partly, I wanted to learn everything. I really enjoyed the learning process and how I felt when I solved a complex problem, and still do. I quickly realized, though, that learning everything would be impossible, and not in the least bit necessary. There are developers out there, most of them really, that only ever work in one language their entire career, or maybe 2. Now, I still want more than that, to this day. I want to learn Python, eventually, and C# for the backend, and much, much more. But I know now how long it takes to pick up a language. Part of the rough learning curve was that it was my first language, learning JavaScript. I had no background in programming whatsoever, and really had no basis for these concepts. I think learning the second and subsequent languages will be a breeze comparatively. For the most part, it just comes down to differences in the syntax and in the rules of the language. Now that I know TypeScript, I have a better basis for more strongly typed languages, so I suspect picking up a strongly typed language would be a lot easier. Also, it's my understanding that JavaScript has more quirks in the language than some others, so they may be easier still.

As far as my day-to-day, I'm still working on Jonas Schmedtmann's Advanced CSS and Sass course on Udemy. I don't think I've really talked about this course since the majority of my entries focus on my work and not on my study time. These days, I typically write the entry right before I start studying during the week, so I haven't really put in my study time for the day yet. Plus, there's so much to talk about in my daily work in my job that I think can serve other future developers walking the same path and future employers looking to see how I do in a professional setting. Anyways, this course has been an awesome deep dive on CSS, with more of a focus on Sass than I realized. Essentially, we are learning all of the highly advanced features of CSS, but through the lens of Sass. So, the projects are all Sass-based. I don't use Sass in my job, but I may bring it up to my associate to see if he might be interested in doing so in the future. I think it's pretty nice, but there are a lot of interesting options for React developers. I think he really likes CSS-in-JS, as he's talked about it while developing a React Native application. In React Native, you write all of your CSS in this way, and I actually really like it as well. It also sets up a nice opportunity to create a custom hook to encapsulate that CSS and abstract it into another file. This course is broken up into 3 main sections, with the one I'm almost done with being the longest. Well, I guess I still have about 3 hours left, but I'm about 13 hours into it. This section teaches these advanced features, but without using flexbox or grid. The next section is on flexbox, and the last is on grid. I'm going to follow it up with a course I purchased today, another CSS course by Maximilian Schwarzmueller.

Until tomorrow!