Fighting Sleep

This is the busiest time of the year for me at work; we are in the heart of tournament season. This means that we plan and host tournaments on a weekly basis, sometimes multiple tournaments in one week. This week, we have our monthly member-guest tournament, the beginning of one of our club championships, the second round of one of our ladies' majors, and the first round of our couples club championships. During the summer, we have very few tournaments, and most days are nonchalant. We may only do half the amount of daily rounds we do this time of the year, and it's pretty easy going. These days, I go to work early and come home late, going at 100 MPH the entire time I'm there. Today, I spent the entire day in the shop by myself, checking in 100 plus people, answering phones, I gave a lesson, and set up the tournament we have tomorrow. It was a hectic day, and I was drained by the time I got home. I started working around 7:30 and fell asleep in the middle of trying to study at about 8:45. It was only for a few minutes, but I realized I had nothing left in the tank to give. I figured I should probably write my blog entry before it happens again.

My main focus in my studies right now is completing Stephen Grider's Modern React with Redux course on Udemy. I'm about 22 or 23 hours into the course and only have about 8 or 9 hours left to go, most of it consisting of a final project in which I'm about halfway done with. We've created the routing with React-Router, set up Redux, set up our creation form with Redux-Form, and set up sign-in authentication with OAuth. While this seems like it would be some pretty heavy-duty stuff, Stephen does a fantastic job of explaining everything, so I haven't felt lost the entire course. I've taken courses on Udemy by 4 different instructors now: Colt Steele, Maximilian Schwarzmuller, Andrei Neagoie, and now Stephen Grider. Out of those 4 instructors, I believe Stephen leads the pack by a long shot. Colt is great and is very engaging. I've always been entertained by his courses and have learned a lot. Maximilian is an excellent teacher as well, but sometimes assumes knowledge without going into enough depth. Andrei is awesome, but seems to keep things too simple without diving deeper. Stephen gives his students a deep understanding of the concepts and explains it in a really simple manner. Everyone is different, and his style not work as well for other people, but for me, I've gotten a lot out of this course and the second half of The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp. After this course, I plan to take his advanced React and Redux course, his GraphQL course, and his TypeScript course, for starters.

After completing the Redux forms section, I moved on to the largest section of the course, which covers the creation of a restful server. In this app, the user will be able to create, edit, fetch, and delete streams from a database. To do this, we are using a package called json-server that's held in a separate folder than our client-side code. There are about 4 or 5 projects I've created in my journey so far that stand above the rest, and most of them are full stack projects, involving some type of backend. While this project doesn't seem like it will have a huge backend, the involvement of Redux with this server will make it one of the more complex projects I've worked on. If I can get it properly deployed, it will end up being a great piece for my portfolio. It may take some extra styling to get it looking really nice, but given we are using Semantic UI to do all of the styling, it probably won't be too difficult to get it looking good. So far on the server side, we've only just set up our database. From there, we are using Redux on the client side to get, put, and delete json objects from that database. Like I said, it isn't incredibly complicated up to this point, but I still have a couple more hours in this section, and I suspect it will definitely ramp up. After this section, there are a couple more shorter sections to go for the project, and the rest of the course works with stuff like the context API and hooks, which will be really fun. Then, it's on to the next one.

Until tomorrow!