Work Taking Over

Today was a long and difficult day, but I still made some time to study. I got in to work at 7 this morning and didn't leave until 7 at night. It's not uncommon to work 10 and a half hours in this job; in fact, I work one or two of those shifts every week. Anytime we have a tournament, though, I'm expected to be there for the duration of the tournament. We have a staff of five assistant golf professionals at my course, and I've been there the longest by about a year or so. My role in tournaments is something like the second-in-command when it comes to setup and execution. We have a couple of guys who work really well in tournaments on the outside setup, with carts and staging, and I typically handle the actual tournament itself. We use a program called Golf Genius to create our tournaments, which has a lot of built-in functionality specifically for creating and running tournaments, and over the last couple of years since it came out, I've become really good with the program. One of our other assistants is eager to learn about the program and has come a long way in the last year, and I would say his skills are right there with me at this point. Between the two of us, we are able to run a really well put together tournament. We may encounter errors from time to time, but we problem solve well and are able to meet them head-on.

Today, we had our monthly outing called Stag Day, which is a chance for the men of our club to bring some guests and enjoy a really fun day of golf, drinking, and food. This would be about my 25th Stag Day, and it's something I've become really comfortable with. When I first started at the club, my head professional handled all of the tournament setup and management, but after about 5 or 6 months, he handed that off to me and now is more of a figure-head for the tournament. He does all of the announcements and gets to spend a lot of time meeting and greeting the members and their guests, which is a really good role for him. All the while, we make sure all of the details of the tournament are taken care of and handled without issue. We had a full house today and used every cart we have available, but were able to pull it off without having anything go wrong at all. Everyone had a great time and we enjoyed running it. Unlike most days at the club, which are usually busy but manageable, tournament days are a form of controlled chaos. It's non-stop action from the time we walk in the door and it's difficult to find time to catch your breath. We've found creating lists of tasks helps to derive some form of order to everything, but that only alleviates it to a certain extent. As I said yesterday, this is only one of many tournaments we have in the upcoming months, and we'll be dealing with this chaos constantly.

By the time I hit the books, it was already 8 and I was drained. But, I told myself I was going to try and study until at least 10, and I was able to pull that off without falling asleep. As I have been doing for the last 2 weeks, I got to work on Stephen Grider's Modern React with Redux course on Udemy. I'm deep into a project where we are building out a clone of Twitch, and it's starting to take shape. Most of what we've done so far was structural, like building the routing, creating the boilerplate for Redux, setting up a json-server to house the stream data, and getting OAuth all set up. Now, we're getting to the fun part where we start to render all of this to the screen. Yesterday, we set up all of the actions for our app, as in the ability to create, show, add, and delete streams to our database. Today, we set up the reducers to handle these actions and started to hook them up to the individual components. We got the create-stream form all set up and ready to rock, which wasn't too crazy, and then moved on to a more complex piece, rendering the list of streams to the homepage of our app. I say it was complex, but for the most part, it didn't end up being that bad. The most difficult part to figure out was adding the helper functions to the mapping of the list. I kept thinking there were some simpler forms of code to write what we were doing, but I think Stephen is going for the most explicit form of the code he can, so as to be as clear as possible about what is going on. I may end up refactoring it into something more workable, and I think that would be a great exercise to help me understand it better.

Until tomorrow!