I stepped away for a little bit to regain my breath since I’ve been working 60-70 hours a week for the last month I needed a bit of break so this will be a web dev recap on this last week but not the week before. Sometimes you just need to step away and recapture your breath.
The biggest thing that has happened in the last week or so is that my software development contract will not be extended. This is definitely not the way in which I had wanted it to turn out but I agree with my former boss with why the decision had to be made. Simply put we were both looking for two totally different things and I don’t think either of us were completely happy. I wanted someone I could learn and train with and he needed someone who had an intermediate level amount of experience in areas in which I had next to zero. Unfortunately it didn’t work out for either of us but I had the opportunity to learn and be introduced to quite a few things that I hadn’t prior to this experience. Overall I came out with a net positive perspective on the experience which I’m quite happy about.
Riding off of a bit of disappointment I decided I’d jump right back into the swing of things. Where I would start is with the foundations. It’s always a great idea to get a solid understanding of the foundations of whatever you are doing. From my experience I came to realize that my foundational understandings of HTML/CSS were not as solid as I had thought they were. Since I started with learning to become a web developer I have relied on Bootstrap, Foundation, or Bourbon as pre-built web frameworks to handle all of the heavy lifting of CSS/SASS. Now having these at our fingertips are exceptional and makes life a million times easier but if you don’t have the foundations they have the potential of robbing you of that specific information. With that insight I jumped back into the foundations and started to solidify them more thoroughly.
Keeping with the theme of foundations I decided to jump into TDD/BDD. My skills in TDD/BDD are not where I would like to see them so I started to force myself to develop 100% in this manner. It’s an area that I feel weak so instead of allowing myself to be okay with that I decided to jump in 100%. It hasn’t been easy, if I’m honest, I often hit brick walls. The problem is that I know what I want the application to do but I’m not quite sure how to test it efficiently and I think this is the struggle that most people face when they start out with TDD. Seeing it as a weakness and it being an incredibly uncomfortable experience I, like usual, doubled downed. If you’re comfortable, you’re not learning.
Finally with this last week I have taken on a client project for one of my business clients. They need an web app built that currently doesn’t exist in the form in which they need it. I find having a purpose when learning new things is essential to make the most out of what you are learning. Having a path on your learning journey is much more efficient than going at it blind. The app is relatively simple but there are some interesting hurdles that will have to be met; multi-tenancy, multiple locations, admin dashboards, user assignments and restrictions and a couple other hurdles. It should overall be an excellent experience and present a great opportunity build a service that doesn’t exist.
This last week came off of a bit of a disappointment but I turned it around by creating a path for the future. I took my shortcomings as areas of growth which I take very seriously and will use that to build my skillset. It’s not always the easiest road but the roadblocks are often the obstacles that we can use to level up. This next week will be a push to build out my foundations and grow my skillset.