Something Different

I've lived in the world of front end development almost exclusively for close to a year now. My focus has been on the JavaScript ecosystem, which I'm convinced you could spend nearly a lifetime studying and still miss out on quite a bit. However, to be a software developer these days, it's typically not enough to know just one language and it's counterparts. Of course, I'm leaving out my knowledge of CSS and HTML for now, but they kind of come along with the frontend package. In my job, I work on the front end of things, specifically with React and React Native on a daily basis. It's rare that I get outside of that area, but that's only because that's pretty much all I know. Our entire stack is up for grabs; I just am not capable of working on the rest of it. We have a backend developer, and he's nearly unapproachable. I wouldn't want to work with him unless I had to, but there are things I need to understand about our backend to be able to do my job better. So far, my cohort takes care of anything that has to hook up to the backend, which happens pretty often. Because of my lack of expertise in this area, I can't help him even though I want to. This became an issue with the payments application. I feel like if I were able to handle that part of the job, we could have deployed it a little quicker, but I had to go through him to get it done.

Now that I understand what our full stack is, I think it's my job to learn it so I can be a better part of the team. I'm limited as to what I can do right now, but it's up to me to get me up to speed. Nobody's going to sit me down and teach me the backend or the database; I have to learn it for myself. Up until this point, my solo studies when I get home from work have focused on things involving the front end. Since I started my job, I've taken 2 courses on TypeScript, 2 courses on CSS, and a course on React Native. I actually intended for my next course to be on React Native as well, but it didn't work out. I purchased Stephen Grider's advanced React Native course with all intent of working through it, but it turned out to be really outdated. He was still using class-based components in React and the packages he was installing with Expo didn't even exist anymore. I got a refund, and thought about what I should learn next. There are 3 areas I think I need to learn about to improve my knowledge of our stack: PHP(but only on a limited basis), ASP.net, and SQL. A while back, I made a list of all the courses I wanted to take in the upcoming weeks and months. I've made some progress on this list so far, but hadn't yet tapped into these three topics. I looked at the courses I had chosen for all three, and decided to go to a SQL course.

It's funny, because last May, I started my journey in learning to code with a mySQL course on treehouse. It turned out to be the last time I would look at a SQL database management system, but it piqued my interest in learning to code. One of my favorite instructors, Colt Steele, had a course on mySQL that I was interested in checking out. Now, at work, we use Microsoft SQL, but from what I can gather, SQL is the language I need to learn and the syntax between different management systems is fairly easy to hop between. I already have a follow up course that doesn't focus on mySQL, so I think I should have a pretty good basis for the query language after those. So far, I'm about a quarter of the way into the class, and it's really not that difficult. There is some interesting syntax involved with the language, but it's easy to understand. Once you get the syntax down, I don't see what the problem would be. It's not my favorite topic, but SQL is in high demand everywhere, and if I can feel comfortable with it, this will be a very marketable skill. And, as with all of my coursework, I get reimbursed by my company for any courses I purchase. Of course, with Udemy, these courses are pretty cheap, but it's always nice to be able to pad my resumé at no cost. I keep a running list of all the courses I've taken on my portfolio, and I'm up to about 630 hours of coursework so far. I don't know how helpful this is for future endeavors, but it does give me some kind of inspiration to keep taking courses and learning more. I want that number to be as high as I can get it.

Until tomorrow!