Flattening the Learning Curve

I have one more day of my work week and then I'm on to my weekend. It will be a busy weekend, since my fiancé will be working both days and it's just me and my little girl, but it will be great to spend some time with her. Now that my leg is a lot better, I'm able to get around without wearing the boot or any kind of aid, like crutches or the scooter I had for a while. This probably sounds like no big deal for everyone who hasn't recently been tethered to something like this, but for me, it's a liberating feeling. It's kind of like when you first learned how to drive and can finally leave the house without having to get a ride from your parents. Instead of living inside this small bubble of possibility, I can go wherever I want to, within reason. I would love to take her to do something on Friday or Saturday, most likely the park and maybe lunch, as we are limited to the time either before or after her nap. It should be fun, but before I get there, I have one more day of work. This week has been a long and trying one, and tomorrow will be no exception. We haven't had any tournaments yet this week, but tomorrow we have our weekly tournament for the Women's Golf Association, we have 2 tournaments on Sunday, and one on Monday, as well. I've been tasked with the event setup for all of these, so my hands are full.

In the meantime, I'm trying to muster up all the energy I have to push on with my React Native course, React Native - The Practical Guide, by Maximilian Schwarzmüller on Udemy. I'm starting to wonder if this was the best class to start with for React Native, and whether I even like his courses at all. I had forgotten from the Vue course I took of his that he moves incredibly fast. It's almost like he records the course and then publishes it in 1.5X speed. I don't know why he would do that, and I'm sure it's not true, but I haven't had to hit the pause button this much since my first couple of classes. If that isn't true, he's one of the fastest coders I've seen in any tutorials or conference talks; he definitely knows all of the shortcuts to take in vsCode, but it seems inhuman sometimes. Besides that, he's gone from a basic introduction of React Native straight into the deep end. I'm okay with that part, since I feel pretty comfortable with React and a lot of React Native's basis is in React. However, there's a ton of unique concepts tied to React Native, and I feel like we are just rushing right through them. At the time I was picking out a course to take, I shied away from Stephen Grider because I felt like I needed a break from him, but I'm positive his course would be a much more appropriate pace for someone at my level with React Native. I'm just barely keeping up, and I'm learning a lot in a fast manner, so I guess it's not that bad.

Yesterday, I was complaining about the workflow and error handling with React Native, and I think rightfully so. However, I think a lot of this frustration stems from just being so new with it. I definitely don't know the ins and outs of Android Studio or XCode, and a lot of these errors are probably fairly common in React Native. I think the more I come across them, the more easily I'll be able to debug my apps. Today was a stark contrast from yesterday. I definitely still ran across some errors, mostly due to trying to keep up with Max, but I was able to debug them in a fraction of the time I was yesterday. I think between yesterday and the day before, I spent 2 or 3 solid hours just trying to find bugs and get back on track; today, I spent about 15 minutes, so I was able to focus my efforts more on the task at hand. Finding errors like this can be a really useful way to learn, and I definitely learned a lot from the errors I had the previous 2 days. This definitely led to a cutback in the time it took me to figure things out today. If I had given up on these errors, I don't think I would have progressed any further, so it's all about being persistent. I also am getting more used to the nuances of the workflow and it's becoming less of a hassle dealing with the 2 simulators. If one of them goes down, I can quickly reset it and use the other one while it's booting back up, so as to not waste too much time. Overall, today was a much better day with React Native.

Until tomorrow!