The Occasional Update - no.2

cover image by yours truly

✨ Hello ✨

How is everyone? Hanging in there? Remember to take a little time for your wonderful self! My plans got a little derailed this week. But I promise - it was for a good reason!

⭐ Let's see how I did on my goals for this past week:
☑️ Post my Week in Review - Ep 2 by Sunday, July 24th
🔲 Complete Lessons 7 and 8 of my React course
☑️ Post about my responsive website project

🗓️ An overview of this week

As I get closer to my goal of landing a full-time job as a frontend developer, bills unfortunately still exist. So this week the majority of my time was spent delivering with DoorDash (which is its own frustration) with little time left for coding.

I found myself with a couple hours on Tuesday morning. I opened up my React lesson, ready to go. And then I got a text from a client!!! About two months ago I did some design work for them, and even though they mentioned having work for me in the future, it had been two months, so I wasn't holding out hope. Turns out they need a website! So I re-shifted my focus. I have been wanting to learn more about Webflow to see if it is a good option for building client websites, so I decided now was the time to explore the popular CMS (content management system).

I am still in the thick of it, and have already run into things about Webflow that confuse me 💀. As I'm working through my first project, though, I am also noting the things that I think might be helpful to know for others trying Webflow for the first time. I will be posting that later this week.

🎉 My win this week

Got that good good client! 🥳

📖 Something interesting I read

I read an article on The ReadME Project written by Cassidy Williams (@cassidoo) called Functional Programming 101.

This article was actually really helpful for me. As I have been learning React, specifically when rendering array data models, there are a lot of steps that seem rather redundant to me. I know I only think the code is redundant because I can't yet fully conceptualize every single thing that the code is doing, but still, I want answers! For some reason, the following quote made something click.

"Data is immutable: If you want to change data, such as an array, you return a new array with the changes, not the original."

When rendering an array data model, you create a callback function that will accept the original array as an argument. Then, you map over the original array to get the values from the callback function to then produce a new array of those returned values 😵‍💫. I already understand what each step does, but the why has been a bit more elusive. But after reading the article, it makes more sense to me. We want the original data to stay original. And we want each function to focus on one change to the original data.

"...functional programming prefers tiny, modular functions that do one part of a larger job!"

AHA!!!! Am I really getting it? Do I now understand the POWER of React? Do I know the inner workings of our universe? Ok ok, I am getting ahead of myself. The point is, while some of this article went over my head, some of it went into my head and made 🌈connections🌈.

📺 What I watched this week

The Bob's Burgers Movie is streaming on Hulu and HBO Max now. My partner and I watched it, and it was good! The animation was a little more 3D than the show's animation, but it was a good upgrade IMHO (unlike season four of Attack on Titan, yikes).

photo credit Tilt Magazine

⭐ My goals for next week (the week of July 25th)

1. Complete my first Webflow project and publish a blog post about Webflow first steps
2. Have my client meeting, determine the cost of the project, set up a schedule for deliverables.
3. MAYBE POSSIBLY do lesson 7 of my React course???

THANK YOU for reading!

🤔 Have y'all consumed any content recently that resulted in an AHA? Or perhaps content that just made you laugh/cry/ponder your existence?