Pictured Above: A rainbow that appeared near my apartment this week. One of two I saw that day. 'Twas a good day.
And yet there's so much to do. Coffee dates, emails, cover letters, assessments, and keep up with your coding and don't forget to blog!
Oof. It never ends. Still, I wouldn't say I'm complaining exactly. I've really been honing my networking skills. And I'm happy to say that nearly everyone that I've reached out to has resulted in at least a coffee date if not a referral. Practice really does help - even if it is exhausting.
In that vein though, practice is essential to stay up to date with these relatively new skills of mine. When you learn something that fast, it's all too possible to let it slide away completely. Thankfully, it has always been the case for me that once I've learned something once, all I need is a brief refresh and I'm good to go again. I'm finding that to be true with my return to old lessons.
When I load up an old project and am faced with lines of Ruby or JavaScript that I wrote in a haze during my time at the camp, imposter syndrome and panic initially surge, because something will look unfamiliar or I won't know what to do. But then I take a deep breath and remind myself that I know this stuff. RESTful APIs are old hat. DOM manipulation is like riding a bike. I review what I've done before, and I'm good to go.
For instance, the first time I pulled up my final project, The World Builder's Tome, I nearly panicked when I thought that absolutely all understanding of Redux had fled my mind. It actually caused some issues in an additional feature I tried to add, because I forgot to go add some essential lines of code to hook up the new files I added. A little debugging and investigation revealed I had gotten so wrapped up in the syntax in my React files that I had neglected the reducers and actions files. Ultimately this was a good experience - learning something twice means it's twice as likely to stick!
And if nothing else, this job hunting adventure has me sampling a truly stunning number of coffee shops across the county. I should map them, and rank who has the best tea and/or hot cocoa.
(Let's see, what would that involve? A map API for one. Some fun CSS fussing to add little icons of coffee mugs or something. React would do nicely, I imagine.)
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