Day 200

200 days ago, on July 16th, I started writing this blog. The initial purpose of this blog was to document my progress in learning how to code, specifically for potential employers to be able to see what I've done and how quickly I've learned. This purpose really hasn't changed, but it also serves a purpose of helping upcoming developers like myself to see what has worked for me and what hasn't. If someone were looking for a roadmap, they could find it here, after quite a bit of reading. I've made some missteps along the way, one of which I believe I'm in the middle of right now, but that information is just as useful as when I've found great success. I've had quite a few interviews so far, some were just the 15 minute phone screens, and others were full-blown interviews. I've talked about this blog in every single interview. I haven't gotten any indication as to whether or not any of these employers have actually read my blog, but to a certain extent that's irrelevant. They will be able to tell how serious I am about making this change in my life just by the fact that I've stuck with it for this long.

Writing a blog entry every day for 200 days straight is not easy. Sure, there are days when the words just flow right out. There are days where I have more than enough to say, and could go on well past my self-allotted 3 paragraphs of content. There are other days, however, where I've worked for 12 hours at my actual job, come home and studied for as long as I could, fallen asleep while studying, and then I still write the blog entry. There are days when I feel discouraged by the whole process, after getting rejected by an employer or after a long period of not getting any interviews. These are the difficult days, but also the most important ones. If I can stick with it, regardless of my current state, then I continue building the habit. I hold myself accountable. I don't expect to do this forever, but in this crucial time of learning and ramping up, this habit and posting a tweet for #100DaysOfCode have kept me going more times than I can count. I know there might be some people out there reading my tweets or my blog, but I'm not doing it for them. I would be very disappointed in myself if I missed a day, and given my type of personality, this could be detrimental. As someone with an addictive personality, it's just as important to respect these good habits as it is to avoid the bad ones.

On to the report. Today, I worked a bit more on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy. I believe I'm close to two-thirds done with the course, leaving less than 10 hours to go to get to the finish line. I've said many times so far, Max is moving very quickly, and I don't think I've come across anyone on the same level of speed as him. So, I decided today to take control: I turned the speed down to 75% on the playback. Now, instead of having to stop the tape every minute or so to catch up, I can actually follow along without stopping. This is actually saving me more time than it's costing me, and I'm absorbing the material more than I was. We mostly worked on some Redux actions today, building out the cart for our shopping app. We added the functionality to be able to add and remove items from the cart, "order" those items, display them on an order screen, and then display the details of that order. This is, by far, the most complicated implementation of Redux that I've done to this point. One of the 3 of my reducers files, the cart reducer, is almost 100 lines of code long, which, for a switch statement, is ridiculous. As we were going through the flow of Redux, at one point, I could see how it was all connected, from one file to the next, but if I were doing this on my own, there's no way I could come up with all of that and fit that mental model into my own head. This will take much more practice. I'm understanding Redux much better than I did even a month ago, but I've still got a long way to go before I can come up with something like this.

Until tomorrow!