An Arduous Process

After a nice, refreshing weekend on Friday and Saturday, I was back at work for a 10 and a half hour day with the first round of our Couples Club Championship. This wasn't a particularly large tournament, but there's always a heightened level of stress when it comes to tournament days, and it took a lot out of me. I got home at about 6, ate some food, and then got right back to work. Unfortunately, my energy levels are fairly low at this point, and I wasn't able to have the most productive night of studying. After about 2 hours of studying, I passed out in the middle of one of the videos, waking up about 15 minutes later. This happens quite often on long work days, but I try to make the best of it when it does. I've studied at least a couple hours every day since May 26th of last year, and some days just happen to be better than others. The main thing, though, is to make some progress, as little as it may be, every single day. Some days, I really don't feel like working anymore, after working a long day. Other days, I've felt discouraged by the process of landing a job and haven't been as motivated to study. There are holidays and special occasions, where it's difficult to find the time to put in some studying. All of these days are the ones that make me stronger and really help me move closer to my goal. The other days are easy, but these are the days that separate the wheat from the chaff.

Yesterday, I started a course by Maximilian Schwarzmüller called React Native: The Practical Guide on Udemy. This is the first course I've taken on React Native. I'm really excited to be learning something new, and I think this was the perfect time to do so. As I've stated in past blog entries, a series of events involving applications and interviews led to me feeling really frustrated and losing some motivation to study. Like I said, I kept on studying everyday, but not at the same pace I was going. Before, I would get down to studying, and try to fit in as much as possible before it got too late in the night, always pressing the envelope as to how late I could stay up and still be functional the next day. After December, I was watching the clock to see how much more studying I had to do in the night before I could call it a successful night. This was a complete shift in how I viewed my study time, and it had to change. It has definitely helped to have some time in between those events in December and now, easing the pain a bit and allowing me to reflect on what transpired, but the fact that I haven't had any real interviews since then has not helped the situation very much. I started a JavaScript course in December, and was really uninterested in working on this, but I finished it nonetheless and moved on to a React course. I thought this would be a good change, but had the same feelings towards this. I needed something fresh and new to sink my teeth into.

While React Native is part of the React ecosystem, a lot of it is brand new material for me. So far, I'm just learning the basics, but so far I know the elements React Native uses are totally different to basic HTML; instead of using HTML elements, there are built-in elements like View, Text, Button, TextInput, and several others. Since the code is eventually compiled down to be used by IOS and Android, it wouldn't be possible to use the same type of syntax you use in the browser, so they use something similar to what you would use in Swift or Java for these types of elements. The styling of these elements is similar to what you would do with CSS in JS, where you create objects that represent the styling for each element and assign them to the style prop, but the styling for React Native isn't exactly CSS. It's inspired by CSS and has quite a lot in common with it, but lacks quite a bit of the totality of CSS and has some other things built in that CSS doesn't. There isn't a huge learning curve in this respect, but it's different enough to grab my attention. Then, rendering a mapped list is totally different. With the ScrollView component that's built in to React Native, you can do something very similar to what you would do with .map in JSX, but that really isn't the preferred way to do things, apparently. The preferred way is to use FlatList, which has a completely different syntax. This, so far, has been the biggest change from React and definitely requires a bit of practice to adapt to this new way of doing things. I would say, overall, this is going to be a great learning experience and is looking like it will spark my interest and motivation once again.

Until tomorrow!