Rethinking Design

With my cohort off for the day, I was on my own today. Unfortunately, I rely pretty heavily on him to feed me work, and I work within the confines of what he gives me to do. Several times, I've gone off on my own and worked on things outside of what he prescribes, and it's never gone as well as I had planned. In fact, every time, I walk away feeling frustrated that my work wasn't being appreciated. After some reflection, though, I usually realize that he is often correct in his assessment and has a better grasp on things than I do. He understands the direction of the company better than I do, he has a better eye for design than I do, and he's better with React than I am. As far as React and design go, my skills are increasing at an alarming rate, but I have a long way to go to catch up. Although we don't necessarily have a hierarchical structure at our company and it's more a flat structure, I still consider him to be my senior. He usually writes up the design on Framer, tells me where I should be spending my time, and reviews my code periodically. In that way, he's definitely my senior.

On Friday of last week, He finished up the cards for the leads in the list of leads. I started working on these on Friday, and pretty much finished up the desktop and tablet versions. The phone style was all messed up, but I knew I would have that to work on this morning. It didn't take very long, though, to finish that up. There's one more thing to do with these cards; there's a chevron button to expand the card and show more information, but he suggested that I hold off on that until further notice. So, after finishing this up, I started wondering what I was going to spend the rest of the day doing. I looked at our mockup on Framer, and I realized the home page needed some serious work. The only problem is that this isn't a page I have been commissioned to work on. My cohort had begun working on this a while back but then his focus turned towards the calendar screen. The home screen was laid out, but it was missing a lot and it wasn't responsive. I spent the rest of the day messing around with this and getting it looking good. I think it worked out nicely, but we'll see what he has to say tomorrow.

I've been searching around trying to find another project to do, and haven't been able to come up with anything I consider worthwhile. One thing that has been bothering me for a while now is the design of this blog. When I originally built this thing, I used Material UI for all of the components, and at the time, I liked the way it looked. Now, though, I don't think I like it at all. There are too many components stacked on top of each other and it kind of looks dumb to me. I would like to get rid of Material UI completely and just write my own styling for it, but I may not go that far. Last night, I started eliminating some of the containers and taking out a bit of the Material UI components. I still have a good ways to go, but this will give me something to do. After that, I think I'm going to go back to the SQL course I've been putting off for some time. Another thought is way off base, but something I might be interested in. I stumbled upon a list of the most liked programming languages out there, and Rust has been the number one pick for the last 5 years. I found a course that is recommended by the Rust website for learning it, so I might give that a try. I think building another project might be off the table for now, but I'll definitely have something to do.

Until tomorrow!