Harder Than it Should be

This is my last night of my weekend, and as always, I'm sad to see it go. It didn't seem like much of a weekend, and I didn't get to catch up on as much sleep as I would like, but it was still nice to be able to spend time with my family. Yesterday, I had a lunch with a company that acts as a middle man between employers and job-seekers, which was interesting. This company is nationwide, and has offices in almost every major city. At the outset, they asked me where I would like to work, and I told them Raleigh, Austin, or Tampa, which I think are all good options. As far as job availability and overall trends in the market, Austin and Raleigh are growing faster than any other city in the US right now. Tampa is ranked at about 19th, so they're a bit behind, but I think there is a lot of potential for their market in the next 5 years. It sounds like, with more growth, there tend to be more cutting edge technology jobs available, depending on where you look. So, for example, Raleigh and Austin both have a lot of jobs available for React and React Native developers, while Tampa has quite a few jobs with technologies that are less trendy, like .net or Java. The person I spoke with urged me to follow the path of JavaScript and React, to stay on the front end, and focus on functional programming over object-oriented programming, which I knew, but found it interesting to hear it from her. They are supposed to send me over a test as a placement for what positions I would fit into, so we'll see how that goes.

Since I had that lunch yesterday, we had to put our little girl into daycare all day, so I didn't get to spend much time with her. After I got home from the lunch, which was up in Tampa, about an hour away, I fit in a short nap, and my fiancé picked up our daughter about an hour later. I got to work on dinner, fixed up some make-your-own tacos, and then it was pretty much time for her to go to bed. I usually like to spend as much time as I can with my daughter on the weekends, since I'm so pressed for time at home during the week, but at least today I got to spend the whole day with her. I slept in a little bit, until about 8, and then got up and hung out with her. We didn't go out or anything today, in fact we stayed home the whole day, which was kind of nice. I'm still recovering from breaking my ankle, so anytime I can get with my foot elevated is much needed. Usually, by the time I get done with 10 hour shift, my ankle is twice the size of what it should be, so it will still be a while before the swelling subsides. My daughter took a long nap this afternoon, and I was able to get some work done while she was down. After she woke up, I ordered some Thai food and we just played and watched cartoons until I got her down at 7. Then I got back to work.

I'm still on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy, the most trying course I've taken to this point. While I think Max provides some really high quality material and he probably knows his stuff better than any other instructor I've taken courses from on Udemy, this course is leaving a bad taste in my mouth for his courses. I was under the impression this course could be taken by someone brand new to React Native, and it is set up in that way. In fact, he goes through in the beginning modules how to set up the developer environment for React Native, so I know this is true. However, I feel pretty comfortable with React and JavaScript, and this course is completely kicking my butt. After a couple of hours of work on this course, I feel like I've been through the wringer and I can't take much more. I'm getting through it and getting as much out of it as I can, but I would never recommend someone start on this course when learning React Native. Because of this course, my opinion of React Native is that it's extremely difficult. I don't think it's easy, but I'm sure it's not any harder to learn than React. Nonetheless, I'm powering through and close to finishing up the shopping app, which is the second to last project for the course. This app has turned out to be really cool, and I would love to find a way to publish it and add it to my portfolio, although I have no idea how to do so at this point. We have a form in the app to add products to the app, so we configured the whole form today, with validation, from scratch. Without using external libraries, this is pretty laborious, but it's not overly complicated. We did use the useReducer hook instead of using Redux for this form, which was an interesting twist. UseReducer is very similar in a lot of ways to Redux; surprisingly, I think Redux reads a little better and is easier to understand for someone looking at the code. That says something, coming from me.

Until tomorrow!