Finish Line Finally

Throughout the last two months, things have become more difficult in a couple of ways. I'm working a lot more and a lot harder at my job, so when I come home, I'm completely drained. In Florida, the perfect time of the year for weather is from December until April. Most days, the temperature hovers around 70 and it rarely rains. Retired people flock here to get a piece of the sun and play some golf, and our club is no exception. The majority of our members only spend the winter months here, and we build our tournament season around that fact. That means some weeks, we host multiple tournaments, and the days we are not hosting tournaments, every tee time is filled until late in the afternoon. As a golf professional, you endure a constant barrage of people pulling you in multiple directions for hours on end; it's exhausting. I also had a series of events involving the job hunt really hurt my pride. I turned down a job in December that didn't offer me an acceptable salary and then made it to the final four for another position before being beat out by someone who was already local. I figured the interviews would keep flooding in, but ever since, I haven't really gotten any interviews scheduled. My motivation was hurt. I kept studying every day, but it wasn't as fun as it was before, and my excitement levels were way down. With that, I decided a change of pace would help alleviate the problem.

I started taking Maximilian Schwarzmüeller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy about 2 or 3 weeks ago. The course was only about 30 hours long when you take the legacy lectures out of the equation, so I figured I would be able to finish it in a week and a half, tops. Boy, was I wrong. Instead, I've slogged through this course and gotten my butt whupped up and down the block. This course has gone at a speed that is so uncomfortable, I actually had to turn it down to 75% playback, which I haven't had to do in any other course. We have covered a tremendous amount of ground, and I've certainly learned a lot, but not in the depth that I would like to learn it. Max has chosen repetition over explanation on many occasions in this course, and I can't say I'm a huge fan of that. I think it takes a highly skilled instructor to go into detail about each step of code, and to truly break it down to gain a full understanding. There are too many instructors in this space that think an appropriate way to teach and, thus, learn is by simply coding along with an instructor. I understand the value of applying the concepts, but the concepts themselves have to be parsed, and that's the step that was missed in this course. I would have been a lot happier with the course, and a lot more comfortable, if he had just taken another 20 or 30 hours and explained all of the things he was doing, instead of just speeding on to the next block of code.

Nonetheless, I still got my money's worth and know a heck of a lot more about React Native than when I started, which was zilch. We've covered a ton of built-in components with React Native and also a bunch of packages that are tied to Expo, which is a similar tool to Create-React-App but with an ecosystem of supporting packages surrounding it. I have 2 sections left, spanning about 2 hours, but I just completed the final project, and feel like we are wrapping it up. The last 2 sections are on creating React Native apps without the use of Expo and then publishing React Native apps, both of which should be interesting and informative modules. I'm actually hoping they are just lecture-based without much coding involved, since I don't think I can take any more of his speed. The final project that we built was an app where the user can store places they have been. We learned how to use several really important tools for mobile apps in this project, and I think it was the most interesting of all the apps we built. First, we learned how to take a picture through the app and get that picture to show up in the app. Then, we learned how to use SQLite to store the places in an array that would be saved for future use on local storage of the phone. Finally, we hooked up Google maps to be able to use a location and find locations on the map. The app itself turned out to be really cool, as did all of the projects in this course. My gripe certainly isn't with the quality of the code, just the pace in which we progressed. I am finally getting my full motivation back, and it's becoming fun again; I'm really looking forward to starting a new course and moving on.

Until tomorrow!