Hard work

Just finished up a temporary job I got hired for last week. I was working running a forklift in  a freezer for a company called GA foods. Wow was it a lot of work; I worked 70+ hours a week, with one week even going over 80 hours. It was difficult and it left me no time at all to study. 14 hour days are difficult to do anything but come home eat and sleep, and even then only getting 5 hours of sleep.
But I did it, a couple months of that gave me a solid income to be able to put all of my effort into programming and striving fro my dream job.

For the next couple months I'll be able to commit most of my time to practicing my code and achieving my goals, and it makes me so excited to be able to do that. I've written out a calendar and a daily schedule to keep on track with everything and log all my hours. It's always been one of my goals to be more organized in my life. I've been trying to keep up on a bullet journal for a while now but it always seems that other things tend to get in the way. I've found organization is key for me being able to accomplish all of the things I want out of life.

As far as the programming goes it feels good. I'm working through a few Udemy courses on Node.js and then I'll be moving to React and Redux. I've been listing to a lot of podcasts about programming as well. They really helped to keep me motivated on those long work days in the freezer. If anyone wants to check them out I suggest programming throwdown, I just loved those two guys banter and the way they talk about things in general. I also really enjoyed CodeNewbie. She does a really good job of keeping things relatable to the newcomer looking for help and guidance, as well as asking good questions of the guests to help me further on my path and stay motivated.

Well that's it for today. Officially on the #100DaysOfCode challenge. Good luck to everyone out there trying to make their dreams come true. Don't ever give up on your goals.

Fixed Up!

Wow, took me quite a while to get the portfolio up and running so you can actually view my projects. The random quote generator was pretty simple to add in and I had it done fairly quickly. The local weather app is what gave me problems, it took me 2 days to get it up and running.

It ran fine on my local machine, but did not on my website. The issue stemmed from a Mixed Content problem. I found that out by using the dev tools in google chrome, easy enough. Then I had to research the issue. After googling for a little bit I found what I thought to be the solution. The problem was that my website is https and the website I had sent an xmlhttp request to was in http. So now the problem was how to I go about switching it to an https request.

After more googling I figured I had two possibilities. One would be to re-write my code using a different API that was https. The other was to route all of the info into my javaScript using a different API to get the longitude and latitude. The real problem I was encountering was that chrome doesn't support unsecured connections when it is using one of its methods. For this project I was using geolocation.

I decided to do some more research before I jumped into either solution. The first would be a large undertaking and seeing as I'm trying to use the website currently to apply for jobs having that link down wouldn't be an option. Luckily I found another solution with just a little more research.

All I had to do was change the link I was sending out in the XMLHTTP request! By just adding on an s to http that was the original link I was able to avoid having any Mixed Content. Wow disaster averted. It felt great to finally have it figured out and working!

Moral of the story is more research is never a bad thing. But I still have to put in the work to hit on those new problems and ways of viewing the problem to come up with some better ideas. Also I need to document my code better. I can't remember why I originally put it as an http instead of https.

Changes

A lot of big changes have been happening in my life recently. First off I just moved in with my girlfriend of a year and a half. I'm really excited about it and the new adventurre we're off on. I'm also looking for new work. I'm talking to recruiters to help me get a job out in the tech field. Part of me suffers from imposter syndrome, but I know that will pass. I feel confident that I can make a strong impact on any team I'm a part of. With moving and looking for a new job tomorrow will be the day for me to jump back into my code. I want to start a new project and see how it goes. I'm also planning on updating my website to make it more interactive with a couple of pages. All good things that can help me out on the job search.

New Courses

So I've recently started a couple new courses. One is on mongoDB from MongoDB University and it has been extremely helpful in learning the back end. I'm starting to get pretty comfortable. It's also helping to refine my knkowledge on Node.js. I also got a course on Node.js just to make sure I have a really solid understanding of that as well. Once I'm done with those two courses I'll have a couple nicer projects to add to my portfolio. Things are going smoothly, the learning has been getting easier and concepts haven't been taking me so long to understand. It's crazy how it just takes some time and effort and before I know it I can already see progress with my learning and understanding. The job hunt continues as well. I'm going to be looking into Launchcode.org once I've done a few of the coding challenges on hackerrank.com

Anyways I think that's enough out of me for one post.

Next Steps

Well I'm on to the next step, which is rinse and repeat, keep learning. I've found that my motivation to work on anything has drastically spiked up when I have a project to work on and something to work towards finishing. Problem is I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas. Right now I think I'm going to make a cookbook or something like that with recipies from around the web or maybe a learn to cook website that puts all the information from my favorite videos right to hand. I guess they say you just have to build and as you do you get better so that's what I'm going to try and accomplish now.

On top of that I'm going to start my react class and make sure I can get the basics of that done with node.js. Soon the mongoDB class I signed up for is starting. I believe it's on August 8th or something similar. I know I have a couple weeks left until it happens  so i should be good and prepared for when it finally does start. All in all things are on the up and up. Keep on coding everyone and don't stop moving forward.

Keep Moving Forward

Well I'm just about done with the portfolio page. I've had to add in some pictures and some CSS work to make it look pretty. Next step will be simple enough but adding in the resume. Easy to just add it to the files. The biggest thing I'm worried about is the resume itself. I've never really made one before so I'm very nervous about it. My sister's fiance told me that I probably have impostor syndrome; where I feel like I just don't belong even though I probably have all of the skills. I'm going to show it to a few friends to have them critique it and let me know what they think of the thing.

I've found that one of the biggest things at this stage is asking for help about the networking process. I'm afraid to ask people if they can help me look for a job. Maybe it's all just fear that I'm going to get rejected. To be honest I do have fears that I'll constantly get rejected and never make it into the industry. From what I've heard getting a job is all about who you know and how well you can network.

Well I guess that's enough of my rambling for now. Time to finish this webpage off and see if maybe I might be able to get a job after all. Who knows maybe luck is on my side, I did just get a fortune cookie!

Web Page!!

So I got my webpage up and running and copied all the files from the resume repository over to the github pages repository. It took some time and thinking but I finally got it done. What took me so long was that I wanted to get the CNAME right. I was having a lot of difficulty navigating all that with godaddy.com so I decided to just go ahead and to the website forwarding from my domain.

I'm happy with the results but I'm not done yet. still have some more <a></a> to add my resume to the website and then a couple images of my projects and I'm off to the races! Feels good to be almost ready to legitametly hit the job market. I've put a lot of time and effort into this and I'm excited to actually see the fruits of my labors. I can't believe I actually have a website. I remember thinking a year ago how that would be crazy and I wasn't sure if I could ever get it done. But here I am.

Just gotta keep on striving forward and I know I can make it there one day!

Getting it moving early

    So this week is  a trial run of living with my girlfriend for a week; it's to get a base idea of what it might be like to live together and move in. We plan on moving in together in October. Of course we haven't officially said we're going to yet, I don't see why we wouldn't.
     Today is day number one of that, and so far it's been great. Especially for our work schedule differences. She has to get up early for work which helps me to get out of bed and get going in the morning. So far it's helped me to get a lot more accomplished. Look I'm even posting on my Blog!
     The code has been going pretty well. I finally completed by local weather application and now I think I'm going to get back into some hardcore lessons on doing react and node.js. Once I have a good handle on those I feel like I'll be ready to go ahead and get a junior developer job. Although the time to start applying is now from what my mentor told me. I need to make some cold calls to start with but that'll be when I've finished my porfolio which I only need to add a couple JavaScript images to. So much work I still have to do, but I'm looking forward to it. It's exciting to have gotten bit by the code bug as Steve would call it. I'm getting to the point where I'm thinking about writing code a lot more in my everyday life. I've even got my girlfriend to help me come up with website ideas to make for cool websites to make.
     Anyways that's enough for today. I'm going to try and update this thing at least 3 times a week and stay at it regularly. maybe I'll add in a daily goals section, A gratitude section, and an improvement section. I think that would be helpful. Anyways that's all folks.

Long needed update

     Well, back at it again. I haven't kept up with this at all like I should have been. I feel much more confident in my programming skills. I've still been working on JavaScript and also a couple of other projects. I've found that my passion really revolves around building things. The learning out of books and websites is great, but I can't really get passionate about it unless I'm actually building things.

     That being said I'm working on three things right now, my portfolio webpage, a local weather application, and a random quote generator. I put them off for a little while but when I get something working in them it feels so good. I've put the most work in on the weather app because it interests me the most. The quote generator mostly just needs some CSS work to get it cleaned up and looking nice. The weather app needs a lot of CSS work and it will start looking really pretty.

    It seems to me that CSS is now my biggest struggle, not the actual doing of it but finding the motivation to actually do it. It feels like the grinding part of it, but just as with all the other programming I do starting is the hardest part. Once I get into it and actually start working on it, it really is a lot of fun. Mostly I'm just trying to finish some stuff so that I can have this portfolio finished and I can have something to show off.

   Well that seems about enough for today. Lets call it quits and get some more programming done!!

Step One.

So I'm going to try and start this blog to outline my path of becoming a computer programmer and getting an entry level job into the field.
     It's going to be difficult to keep up with but I'll be trying my hardest to keep posting. Currently I'm working my way through freecodecamp.com and loving it. It's the first coding lessons I've had that I've been able to stick with everyday consistently. That has been one of the biggest challenges for me, to find the motivation to keep on moving forward. As my brother would say "Gotta keep it movin', gotta keep it movin'."
     So for anyone that might read this here we go!