Not Getting Easier

I finished my hump day for the week, and I am completely beat. Today was a 10 and a half hour day at work with 2 1-hour lessons, and it took everything I had to make it through. We were really busy and I was running around from the time I got to work to the time I left. When I got done at 5:30, I had to run across town to get my daughter from daycare before they closed up at 6; I made it with about 5 minutes to spare. This is the first time I've had to do this, but I have to do it again tomorrow, as well, so I'm glad I made it in time. Often at work, someone will walk in at the last second and decide they want to talk to me for 15 minutes, delaying me from being able to leave right at 5:30. This is not an option if I have to get across town by 6, so I'll have to try and avoid this again tomorrow. After hosting 3 tournaments in 2 days and now having a 10 and a half hour shift today, I am completely out of energy. Over the weekend, I talked about how I had caught up on some sleep and that I was hoping that would help me in the week to come, but it didn't take me very far. By today, I feel like I'm right back where I started with my level of exhaustion. I made it through about an hour of studying after getting my daughter down to bed and I fell asleep for about 20 minutes. This was a useful catnap, though; I woke back up and was able to get about another hour of work in, feeling refreshed.

My work continues on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's course, React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy. Every day since starting this course, I've talked about how difficult it is, and it seems like every day it gets a little more difficult. While this makes sense, I thought after a while I would get more comfortable with React Native and it would come more natural for me, but that has not been the case. Instead of getting to a level of comfort, Max keeps piling up more and more information to try and absorb. I would never give up on the course; in fact, I think I'm getting a lot out of it. However, I do regret starting with this course when learning React Native, and if anyone asks, I will not be recommending this course as a starting point. He assumes a lot of knowledge about React and even more about JavaScript, which is fine, but he's not spending nearly enough time explaining some incredibly complex concepts in React Native. I really like the projects we've built in the course, so far, and visually, they are really appealing. Also, instead of using some sort of component library like Semantic UI or Bootstrap in React, Max is building all of the styling from scratch. There are some component libraries for React Native, and I'll be curious to explore those in the future, but it's really cool to build these apps without the help of a library. The end result is still very visually appealing.

I just finished up the third major project of this app, which was builiding a recipes app. This app's main screen has a bunch of buttons with different categories of recipes. When a category is clicked on, it pulls up a list of relevant recipes with images of the recipe. When one of the recipes is clicked on, it pulls up the actual recipe. We learned all about React Navigation in this app, and added three different types of navigation: tabs, a stack, and a drawer. These effects are really cool, and are exactly what you would get when using any sort of real app. The effects are a bit different between the android platform and ios platform, so we styled them accordingly with ternary operators differentiating the platform. We also created a favorites page, where users can click on a star on the recipe page to add that recipe to their favorites, and a filters page, where the user has the option to filter the recipes to be only vegan, lactose-free, vegetarian, or gluten-free. To achieve these features, we had to implement Redux, so the state could freely flow throughout the app. I've taken so many courses on Redux, and every time it's a real struggle. This was no exception, especially since React Native itself is so foreign to me. We used some hooks that are now built into Redux which I hadn't used in the past, as well. I don't think Max spent nearly enough time going over these, but I could see how useful these could be if I were to understand them better. Now, we're on to building an e-commerce type of app, which I'm sure will be even more challenging than what we've done so far, but the repetition should help me solidify these concepts.

Until tomorrow!