Polar Opposite

I went yesterday from complaining of not knowing what I needed to do next, to having pressing deadlines and more on my todo list than I can handle. In my opinion, I would rather have more work than less. I hate not having direction as to what I'm supposed to be doing, and not feeling useful. Since I'm so new on the job, I'm not as self-sufficient as I would like to be. If I had been there for a few months at least, if not a couple years, I would be able to give myself direction. If I found myself with nothing to do, I would be able to point myself in another direction and find something to do. At this juncture, though, I only know one of the applications of the company, really. I worked on another one of their applications in the very beginning, but it wasn't really in my area of expertise. I want to stay in the realm of React as much as I can on this job, as well as branch out to some of the back end parts they have going on at the company. There are quite a few projects going on involving creating articles in HTML and adding them into an application. This application is written strictly in HTML and CSS with a little bit of JavaScript for validation and forms. I would love to see this whole application moved over to be something similar to my blog, but on a much larger scale. This would be a perfect use case for Gatsby with Contentful. First off, Gatsby would be able to handle any kind of SEO they would add into the application, of which they rely upon heavily. Secondly, Contentful would make their workflow so seamless. Right now, they can barely keep up with the articles coming in, and are actually behind. They are having a hard time transferring these articles from being written as documents into being in HTML format. If they created a schema that could handle different kinds of media, it would make their lives so much easier. Not to mention, the work just doesn't look as good as it could if they were able to spend more time on the styling of it, which they can't.

So, yesterday, I was talking about how I reached out to my CTO to get some answers about what I would be doing next, and I never heard back from him. In these times, I can totally understand that he's a bit behind and totally bogged down with emails and answering everyone's questions. We have a whole slew of people that are transitioning into working remotely, and he is very much a part of making sure everyone is adjusted into this new environment. For our team, it would be a simple transition, since we are very tech savvy, obviously. We would be able to be on board within a couple hours, and it wouldn't affect our work in the least. However, for some of the other departments, there are quite a few people who are having a difficult time making this adjustment. Anyways, I put my foot down this morning, and made sure I got some answers. And I did. I was told we would be adding a different way of processing payments. So, right now, the application can only process payments through a credit card. As it stands, the user would type in their credit card number and it shows up on a little animation of a credit card in the appropriate spot on the card. They want to create a similar page, but for a bank account. They want to have an animation of a check, where when you type into the form field your routing or account number, it shows up on the check in the correct spot. Since we wrote this so nicely with the useReducer hook and context, hooking this step into the app was so simple. Creating the check itself, however, has been a little challenging.

I got pretty far into creating the actual check and started working on the validation of the routing and account numbers, but then we got a surprise deadline. The company wants to put up an advertisement for signing up for a virtual appointment. When they click on the ad, it takes them to a form where they fill out their information and then pick a time to speak with a representative. At first, they told us they wanted this done by the end of the day. We got this deadline at 1:30, so that gave us 3 hours to create a full website. That wasn't going to happen, but I treated it as though it was a firm deadline. I knew it would get pushed back, but I wanted to get as far as I could. Initially, when I started thinking about this application, I thought about it as a 3-step process. The page would pop up with just a zip code field, check to see if that zip code was in our covered area, and then move on to the information form, where they would fill in their name, email and phone number. After hitting the next button, they would be taken to another form where they would pick a date and time to hold the appointment. While I was working on this, my neighbor was working with one of the designers to come up with a layout for the site. What they came up with was really cool, and my neighbor is really talented with CSS, so he was able to hook it up pretty quickly. After that, we discussed the flow, and decided it was probably a little better to keep it all on one page. This was a bit disappointing, since I had created a reducer to handle the changes in UI state, and it worked really well, just like the other application. However, I know he knows much better than me, and I'm willing to do whatever he says. I should have plenty to do in the coming days, so it should be a fun week.

Until tomorrow!