Struggling, but surviving

As I've said in previous posts, "The Complete React Developer in 2019" is kicking me in the behind on a regular basis, but I'm actually getting through the course pretty quickly due to less errors. The course is taught really well, but they started with the premise of being a beginner-level React course. I was actually talking to a guy on Career Karma today that was considering taking this course as an introduction to React; I urged him not to do this, of course. At the very least, this is an intermediate-level course. This is my second React course, the first being Colt Steele's "The Modern React Bootcamp," and I wish I would have put at least one more course in between that one and this one. But, it's too late now for that, so I'm getting as much out of it as I can. I listened to a podcast this morning that affirmed my learning approach: the guy said that, with programming, some topics are not meant to be understood with one walk-through. Some topics take multiple tutorials to actually understand. I think if I were to get stuck on one specific topic, I would end up treading water for a period of time and losing overall progress. That said, I will finish this course with a much better understanding of React and a lot of other technologies involved with React than I started, so that's a success.

I was able to finish 2 sections covering Redux Thunk, today. Redux Thunk is a nice way to handle Higher Order Components as a function instead of an action, so we used it to refactor the Spinner component that we just implemented. The actual project is deployed and works just fine, but there are still 7 more sections of refactoring and adding functionality. We are about to introduce Redux Saga, and after that, we go on to introducing hooks, context, a backend to process Stripe payments, Apollo, GraphQL, and finally we will make it mobile-responsive and learn Jest for testing. This course, like I said, is comprehensive. The list of technologies used just in this project is extensive and impressive. After the project, there is a section on building a blog site with GatsbyJS, which I'm very excited about. I would really like to re-work this blog; there is a lot of functionality that I would like to add, and I think Gatsby with solve a lot of this. For example, I don't have the functionality right now to add a link into a post, or really anything other than what I have pre-determined in the initial post schema. I could definitely change this schema to add a whole list of stuff, and this would be ideal, but unfortunately I made this initially with Vue, Nuxt, and Storyblok, which I just don't know well enough to mess around with yet. I plan to eventually move on and learn Vue, but there's so much more to learn with React; it will be a while before I move on to Vue.

I heard back from the guy that I talked about yesterday who's doing a talk at a GraphQL meetup coming up. I had asked him if he had any interest in starting a new meetup group centered around React, but unfortunately he was already preparing to start another meetup on Whiteboard interviews. I offered to help him in any way I can, but of course I don't have any experience with whiteboard interviews yet, so I don't know how I could be of service. Nonetheless, I'm glad I reached out to him, and I think this will eventually lead to good things. I need to keep finding ways to get involved with local developers, specifically React developers, so that I can find a way into the tech industry. At the end of the day, it always comes down to who you know over what you know, and since I don't know much yet, I should get to know some people!

Until tomorrow!