The Week's End

It's been a nice, lazy weekend overall, but I was still able to get quite a bit of work in along the way. I understand that, while I am gainfully employed as a Software Developer, my development as a developer is far from over. I have a really good base of understanding on a lot of topics, and some I'm even approaching an advanced level, but this is going to take years to cultivate, and really the learning process is never over. I've said it before, but since this isn't something I grew up doing or have been doing for years, I have a lot of work to do to get up to speed with the rest of the pack. All the while, the rest of the pack is continuing to develop their own skills and advancing themselves. So, I feel it's imperative to work incredibly hard, harder than I probably will in the future, in these beginning phases. I'm approaching a year of intensive study, and I've accomplished a lot, but there's still so much to learn. Eventually, I would love to be fluent across the whole stack, and more than likely with Node on the backend, but that's not set in stone. I've dabbled in the backend, but my knowledge on the side of things is pretty trivial. If you were to ask me to write a full-stack application on my own, I may be able to piece my way through it, but it would likely be pretty ugly and would take me an inordinate amount of time.

On the front end tho, I'm becoming pretty mediocre, and I mean that in a good way. I'm far from advanced, but if I look back even 2 or 3 months ago, before I started this job, my knowledge is growing at a much quicker pace. Not to mention, my studies are more in line with reality than they were before. I took multiple courses on things like GraphQL and Gatsby, which are both hot right now and are definitely important technologies to understand, but certainly aren't going to help me in my job on a daily basis. I would love for us to be using either one of these, and can even see use cases for both of them where they would improve all kinds of facets of our applications, but there's no plan to use these any time soon. So, since I've started the job, my focus in my studies have been on things I can see are not my strong suits and that I will be needing to use right away. The first 2 courses I took after starting the job were on TypeScript. It's interesting, because my cohort on the front-end was only using TypeScript in one application I still haven't even worked on, but he was totally sold on it. It was something he wanted to use in the future going forward, and something he wanted to morph the old code into using. So, the application I was assigned to work on, a React application that walked users through signing up for a plan, was written in plain JavaScript. Within the first week of starting there, he helped me migrate that over to TypeScript, which gave me a good base of understanding of it. But, I knew if I wanted to freely use it going forward, I would need to know more, so I signed up for a couple classes.

Next, I realized how bad I was with CSS. Every project I had created on my own had been written with component libraries like Semantic UI or Material UI, which are great and I love, but totally avoid the use of writing your own CSS. You may need to know a little CSS to work with these, but not much. I got into this payments application, and every time I messed with the CSS, I felt like I was making it worse. So, I moved my attention over from TypeScript to learning CSS on a deeper level. I took a course by Jonas Schmedtmann first, which is highly regarded and I've seen recommended by all kinds of people time and again. It lived up to the hype, and as a byproduct, I actually learned Sass to the point where I would like to implement it in some of our projects going forward, if my cohort is willing. Once I finished that course, I had already planned to take another one to cement that information and really drill it in. This course is by Maximilian Schwarzmueller, and his courses are always a notch more difficult than any others, so I thought it would be a great follow-up. This course has three sections: basics, advanced use, and expert use. I just finished the basics section and actually got more out of it than I planned. There are topics like position and display with block or inline-block I've always just thought I knew, but never really did. Now, I feel like I have a much better understanding of them. It looks like there are some interesting topics coming up in the advanced section, so we'll see what I can learn.