With the holidays and travel, my development and writing time has been all over the place. It definitely is further evidence for how I benefit from routine and self-created structure. I still made progress in my development goals, but it did slow down. I knew this going in, and it was more important to be present and spend quality time with my family. ...
Testing has definitely intimidated me. From the syntax to the general concepts, the whole thing seemed elusive. I planned on implementing testing from the start of the redesign, but delayed the implementation because I was also learning CSS-in-JS and didn’t want to overwhelm myself too much. I had the website coming together and a fairly solid grasp on using Emotion by the end of week one, and it was time to make the leap. ...
The second round of 100 Days of Code officially began for me on November 25, 2017. The first one was a fantastic success and a valuable tool for my growth and learning trajectory. The continued dedication and motivation to consistently be moving forward has brought me farther than I anticipated in a short period of time. Before starting this next round, I thought of some specific ideas and goals that I hope to reach. ...
Believing the issue to be so complex and seemingly run by magical elves, negative self talk can try to influence us to believe that we cannot accomplish such a feat. However, when the problem is broken down into its smallest components and each one is tackled piece by piece, the larger problem can become much more approachable. The first round of the 100 Days of Code challenge has completed, and it served the exact needs that I was looking for. Primarily, I was hoping for added motivation to keep pushing the needle forward each day and a community to work alongside in my learning path. I only missed a couple days (which I didn’t count) and some of them were intentional due to family commitments. It was important to maintain some boundaries, as it is really easy for me to fall deep into a project and lose track of several hours. ...
Building smaller projects helps to reinforce learning and be able to freely experiment with things. Larger projects require significantly more forethought on the app and data architecture, technologies used, and overall direction of the project. This past Tuesday evening, the team project that has enveloped all of my free time has launched. Wanderful is a random travel destination site built utilizing the MERN stack. Users are able to visit the site and click a button on the landing page to discover details about a randomized destination stored in our database. Here they can get a quick blurb about the location, and information about various points of interest including: hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and the ability to check flights to get to the location. If a user creates an account with the site they are able to save their favorite destinations and POIs where they can easily view them on their favorites dashboard. If a user desires to get any more information about a give POI, they can click on the given item to have the Yelp details for that location open in a new window. ...