Thank Jeebus

Section 20 was a 2 and a half hour section that took about 6 hours to complete. I swear, as we go further into this course, this guy Yihua Zhang is going even faster than he was, which I didn't think was possible. I actually understood more than I thought I would about Redux Saga, just don't ask me to explain it. I had a couple of errors that held me back, but I was able to identify them both times on my own, without having to go back through the videos to find what I missed. That's a big accomplishment for me. That means I could track the flow of the design pattern to figure out the route of the issue, something I've struggled with up until this point. After seeing all of these tools in action, you start to realize that it's just a series of patterns; while it definitely looks complex at first glance, the patterns repeat themselves with different methods and properties. While I'm still completely lost, there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Outside of the coursework, I'm trying hard to make some connections in the business. I've been going through the list of mentors on Coding-Coach and private-messaging them on Twitter asking for mentorship. Unfortunately, most people have either been too busy or just haven't gotten back to me yet. This is a donation of their time to do mentoring, so it's totally understandable for them to turn me down. I did, however, here back with an affirmative from one guy, Ben Hong! He seems like a really nice guy that really wants to help me level up my skills, and I'm looking forward to where this goes. I've only had a preliminary interaction with him, but I'm hoping it blossoms into a true mentoring opportunity. I'm looking to learn from the best and the brightest, and he definitely is in the elite.

Tomorrow, my parents and grandparents are coming down for the week to hang out with our family. My grandparents haven't met my daughter, yet, and we're very excited for them to bond with her. Kaija is a very lovable character, and I'm sure she'll steal their hearts. My family has been incredibly supportive of me making this career change; they listen to me ramble on about stupid little projects I'm doing and share in my successes. It definitely is a good feeling to be able to show them my work in website form. That's the beauty of web development, or any real art form: you get a tangible result. They've watched me go from putting an image in an HTML document and throwing it on a local server to some of my more recent projects using React that are maybe 30-40 files deep with tons of functionality. It's crazy how far I've come in 3 months; I can't even imagine where I'll be in another 3 months.