Recentering My Focus

The Holidays Are Over

My subjective feeling is that this year’s holiday season and its aftermath have not been a terribly productive time for me. I took off the week of Christmas entirely. Last week my child was sick and it snowed a foot. My child care fell through, so my focus was on being a dad and keeping up with my dayjob.

However, looking back now I can see that I’ve accomplished a lot!

New Year, Same Goals

We’re almost one month into 2022 already. In October, the contract I am working on ends. Whether or not I’ll have a job after that is unknown. Before then, I would love to transition to a new career: a career that is intellectually stimulating and provides a sense of accomplishment.

The Path Forward

1. Get better at coding

I’ve been working on HackerRank problems daily. I know LeetCode is cooler these days, but HackerRank has a ready-made and free 3-month Interview Prep Course. I’ve been working along in Typescript. I can’t say I love puzzling over algorithms, but it is pretty satisfying to have a proposed solution pass, and I’ve been learning a lot. Notably about bitwise operators and HashMaps, which I don’t think I’d ever encounter in web-land.

I’ve also just finished working on Wes Bos’ JavaScript 30in30. What a great course! It’s a very hands-on DOM-manipulation heavy course. I learned lots of DOM-manipulation tricks that I was previously able to do with a framework, but now understand how to do with raw JS.

2. Focus on Marketable Skills

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I haven’t seen a lot of jobs looking for familiarity with Svelte. What has surprised me is how few jobs I’ve seen aren’t even using React! I’m seeing WAY MORE PHP than I expected to. A fair bit of Node. Weird how some of these technologies have hung on. I don’t want to fully compromise and learn WordPress or anything, but I think I’d do well to shy away from the bleeding edge for a bit.

I have a Learn Node.js course I bought from Wes but haven’t taken yet. I think one of my next projects will be building out a new project using his Node scaffold. I’m also going to watch the testing chapter Wes added to his Advanced React course. I think in a perfect world I’d develop my Node app with Test-Driven Development principles.

3. Learn Some Serverless

I still don’t know the first thing about “serverless”. But I’d like to know more. I’m not sure what the path forward is on this one, but it’s something I am going to pursue further.

4. Stay Positive

Looking for jobs is tough. It’s a cycle of being disappointed by what is available, trying to find a job that you can psych yourself up into believing you could do, and then facing the disappointment of failing to be considered for the position. The forums are full of entry-level coding-job-seekers like myself that are struggling to break in, some with much better credentials than I have. I’m trying to find local avenues to make professional contacts that could potentially yield entry-level work. 💪 🚀 💪 🚀

Gotta keep applying!