Making the Right Choices

At the onset of this week, I expected to be taking my CS Prep course today and tomorrow, but it turns out the classes are only Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday, so I have today and tomorrow off. There were suggestions to attend one of the Meetups for Codesmith, but I decided to study on my own instead. I had talked about doing some pair programming today in my blog yesterday, but given a couple of fairly long days at work, I decided to retreat into my solo studies instead. I'm working on the second half of Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New Modern JavaScript Bootcamp, with a long way to go before I finish it. In the second half of the course, everything is structured around building projects in plain vanilla JavaScript, which is something I never really took a lot of time to do, and has been awesome. As soon as I could figure out how to use frameworks/libraries like React and Vue, I jumped right in. Of course, I've spent countless hours going deeper and deeper with JavaScript by itself, but building projects was never really part of that. In the majority of the coursework I took on JavaScript by itself, the concepts were explored in an abstract way and it was often difficult to tie in to actual web development code I would be writing. So, for that reason, this course has been a real winner.

Right now, we are building a really cool, yet fairly simple maze game using a library called MatterJS. MatterJS gives me the capabilities of creating shapes and objects that have physic properties given to them. For this project, we are using this library to randomly generate the walls of the maze, a ball that can be moved around the screen, and a box that serves as the end point. While the maze itself is fairly simple at this point, the code for this project has become pretty extensive in a short manner. However, the code itself is very easy to understand and, as I said in an earlier post, I believe I could replicate it in some form or another; either I'm getting much better at JavaScript or Stephen Grider is a great teacher. I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking through Stephen's library of courses he offers on Udemy, and saw some great options for the future when I finish this marathon. He has a course on GraphQL, one on TypeScript, one on advanced React and Redux concepts, and one on NodeJS that really piqued my interest, but we'll see how I'm feeling when I wrap everything up.

This time last week, I was expecting an offer from a local company for a software development job. I was almost positive I was going to get the job, but I didn't know the specifics of the offer. I was feeling really happy to have gotten that far, and hadn't even considered that it was going to be as difficult a decision as it ended up being. The offer came in on Friday, and the number they offered me was disgracefully low. I was disheartened and angry at first, then I thought I could stomach it for the experience, but in the end, after discussing it with my fiancé, it seemed to be an offer we couldn't take and maintain our current lifestyle. After having less than an optimal day at work both today and yesterday, I've thought many times that I should have taken the job. I would be gaining that ever valuable experience and I would be doing something I truly loved, despite being unappreciated. I haven't really had any other opportunities arise since then, and 2 companies I was expecting to hear back from never did contact me, so it seems like my luck ran out. I know that's not true and I'm being shortsighted, but this was a huge decision to make and I think I will wrestle with it for some time to come. Whether I made the correct choice is yet to be seen, but as long as I continue working hard, I know everything will work out in the end.

Until tomorrow!