This one might fall into the incoherent ramble category but bear with me. And, if you just growled like said beasty when I described that, I salute you.
I’ve started the #100DaysOfCode challenge many times and think I’ve only completed it once. Maybe, twice but I can’t quite remember. You could argue that I’m not consistent and persistent enough to commit to coding daily. However, I prefer the argument that for all the times I have failed, I keep coming back, putting in the hours, and struggling. It’s a good struggle for the most part. Today marks day three of my most recent attempt at maintaining consistency. Honestly, I am feeling bootcamp fatigue right now. We've been learning so much, so frequently and at some point this year I’d like to take a break to do sweet nothing for a little while. Preferably with a bit of sun. For now, I’m just going to keep turning up, keep chipping away and keep coding.
What’s that saying about taking opportunities when they’re presented to you? There are so many quotes about this but Jim Carey said, "Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them." With that said, Command Shift approached me about using my Codewords podcast in their social media content and I gladly said yes. On a separate occasion, they put out an open call to our cohort requesting guest speakers to attend an open evening they had, and again I said yes. That one really took me out of my comfort zone. In contrast, hosting and leading a conversation on a podcast comes much easier to me, as opposed to being the one asked the questions. This tells me that I should take part if more opportunities like that come up and I’m available. This leads me to the next thing on my to-do list on that front. I’ve been approached to film a few ‘selfie-style’ video snippets to help give prospective students an insight into my learning experience and what the course is like. So that’s all good. I’m still getting over a horrible cold that caught me off guard but once I can talk without sniffling again, I’ll get that one in the bag.
The last time I made a blog entry, I mentioned the unbearable weight of imposter syndrome that was crushing me. I’m happy to say that I’m over the tsunami of inadequacy, for now. It’s a vicious cycle of not understanding something, and feeling like the reason for that is because I’m too stupid and out of my depth. To, eventually grasp what I’m doing but then a few bugs later and the imposter syndrome comes back. At the end of the day, I finished the backend music library project which feels like a massive victory. I gained express.js skills by learning how to design and implement an API which can perform CRUD operations on a database. Do I feel like I’ve mastered it? Nope. It would be great if that were the case but I respect the fact that I’m rapidly learning an array of technologies and programming languages in a short amount of time when compared to developers that have been doing it for years.
So where am I now? Well, the backend module is finished now and we’ve moved over to frontend and learning React. It’s been a while since I last used it but I am familiar with it. I used it during my Codecademy course to build a music playlist maker utilising the Spotify API. I won’t tempt fate but I like React and JSX.
Did I tempt fate? No, I didn’t. I finished the React technical test on the Command Shift track and I somewhat understand what I did. I broke down a web page into three components. An app component that has a search field and button, and a component that displays the results from a NASA API following a GET request to display the images from an array of data. It displays ‘no results’ in the search results component if there are no results. I was surprised by the number of cake results that came back when I tested it, but that’s another story. I’m looking forward to getting more practice over the next three weeks for the next project.
This last one kept me awake at night. I have to overcome the hurdle that I have to wait to apply for jobs until I have a glowing CV and portfolio. I need to put the projects I have made on my profiles and just damn well apply. I’ve made a Trello board to track it. What’s the worse that could happen? If I wait for the perfect time to do it, I never will, or I'll miss it altogether. Reading this back I realise that the title should read, 'I've finished multiple projects', and that is the victory I'm holding on to today.