Getting Through the Fundamentals

I spent about 4 or 5 hours last night and a little time so far today going through Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New Modern JavaScript Bootcamp, getting to about 20% of the way through the 42.5 hour course. So far, it has been all about the fundamentals of JavaScript, and I have to say, I haven't really learned anything, yet. If this was the first time I'd seen JavaScript, this would be a great introduction to the language, but I've spent nearly 6 months focused solely on the language and have definitely progressed past the beginner level, at least. Nonetheless, as I said in my last post, I always like to complete a course in full, so I wouldn't feel right if I had skipped ahead. If I were a beginner, I would say that Colt is doing a great job with this introduction and pacing it at an appropriate speed. The structure of concepts covered is logical and he's going into as much depth as a beginner might need. I'm now in the section on functions, so we're starting to get into some more advanced topics. I'm hoping from here on through, it should pose more of a challenge for me than it has.

Tonight, for the first time in about a month, I'm getting back to the pair programming sessions with my friend, Matt Bear. Since my injury, I haven't really felt up to doing the sessions and he's been really understanding of this. Now, I feel like I'm ready to get back at it, and he seems ready to go as well. Usually what we do is look at some problems from CodeWars and take turns having one person articulate the solution and the other actually coding. We may spend some time doing this in our session tonight, but we have some other things to discuss, as well. Matt has contributed to some open-source projects, and I was tasked with showing proof of 5 merged pull requests for a particular job, so I'm hoping he can help walk me through the process of doing this. We've also spent some time in the last few days discussing some ideas we have for potential websites and projects, so we're going to take a look at how we could implement them.

I've heard from various sources that writing technical blog articles can be a real asset in the hiring process, as much so as a portfolio or this blog that I write in every day tracking my progress. Technical articles prove you understand a subject more than just on a surface level and that you can articulate the ideas in writing. I've built up a following on Twitter and LinkedIn, so I think we would have a bit of an audience if we tweeted and posted the articles out. I also built a blog site about a week ago that I think would be perfect for this, with a little tweaking. The layout of the site is really nice and it has pagination already implemented, but the blog entries are currently set up to be written in Markdown, which I don't think is very ideal. We could do it in MDX, which be a bit of a step up, but I don't think that's the answer either. I would love to use Contentful as a CMS, as I do for this blog, so I'm going to advocate for that. I don't think it would be incredibly difficult to change it over to Contentful, and it would definitely be good practice for me to do so. From there, I have a few tweaks I would like to make to the site itself, but the rest of it is fairly minor. Matt wants to start a Discord group for aspiring programmers, and I think we could find a way to incorporate that into the overall site, but I would like to talk further with him about the idea, and what his vision is for it. While it would be possible to monetize this, the real purpose is exposure and landing more interviews.

Until tomorrow!