Not as easy as it seems!

Lot's of topics this week. I've really been picking up the pace a ton! I can tell I am getting super anxious to get through the rest of my learning, and finish up my personal site. It's starting to invade my every thought, and I'm getting really sick of my current job to the point that I've contemplated just cold turkey leaving, which makes no sense because I can't afford that.

That said, things I'm currently working through never tend to be as easy as it feels they should lol. I really wish I just had a person or group of people to work with that I could bounce questions around to. As good as I am at self learning, I can see why a lot of people fail at it. This shit can be stressful.

So, two things that held me up this past week were building my personal site / blog, and this Javascript project I started. With the blog, and using MiddleMan...there was a lot of learning and figuring things out. I am still not very far along. Good news is, I don't have to pay for hosting. I do have my domain set up at colbycheeze.com to point to the middleman site that I created via Github pages.

Now that that is done, I still have to completely design the layout and figure out how all of the posting and stuff is going to work. This will be a full out project I've learned. I could have definitely just gone with a basic wordpress simple no hard work site that would just require searching out a prebaked design, but I guess I just wanted to do it the hard way lol.

It's okay, I still need to practice my HTML/CSS skills so building up my actual site will be a great avenue for that. I've essentially made it my "Final Project" for the CSS section, rather than doing some non-important and forgettable clone that I tuck away into a folder.

The next thing that held me up real bad was the VERY first freaking Javascript project. Honestly I could have gotten it out the door much quicker, but I've decided to start off on the right foot and use Jasmine testing. Problem there, is that I guess I just don't understand how the require works on it and I've spent like 2 hours debugging the very first test not passing. I may be on to a solution, which I'll be working on after this post.

After getting burned out and frustrated on the Javascript, I decided to join Upcase for the forums and some of their video series / tracking etc. I figured 29 bucks after saving myself the 60 in hosting wasn't so bad. Anyway, I spent about 5 hours in total yesterday working on tool sharpening. I've gotten my Tmux/Vim workflow going a bit smoother. I still have a lot of work to do, but it feels great to be able to fly around in there.

Finally...I LOVE PAIRING. Holy crap it is so great. I cannot wait to get into a situation where I can pair daily. I got my sister to come over and I helped her through one of her projects (which uses C lol). C is a shit language (like appearance wise) and her instructors coding practices are even shittier haha. That said, we were able to work together to figure everything out and it was a lot of fun helping her learn VIM best practices and stuff.

The one thing I would do better next time though, is let her do more of the typing. I did a lot of it at first because I can fly through VIM, but it definitely would have helped to let her drive while I assisted in the background.

Well, I'm a bit torn between working on Javascript stuff and getting my site all built up. I know that in terms of getting a job, I have to start focusing on my portfolio, resume, blog and putting out applications etc while on the other hand I may have a bit of imposter syndrome even though I told myself that I didn't. I am PRETTY sure I could get a job, but I also feel like I would just totally bomb an interview if they ask a lot of tech trivia. I can DO the work, but I am shit at some of the terms and on the spot questions...but hey that gives me a visible goal to overcome.

Overall, I am happy with the progress but the bumps in the road hurt the most. I want to FLY through this stuff, however I suppose if I was doing that I wouldn't really be learning or growing. The idea is that the things that are most important and will push me the furthest are the things that are the most difficult and icky to get through. I'll keep that in mind going forward and power through the roadblocks. Until next time...