How Covid Affected a Junior Developer
This is article 3 of 4 detailing my progression as a web developer. In the last article I delved into the details of 3 of my larger projects. In this article I shift forward in time to the near past as I pick up the torch once again to progress my skills further.
It was to be a short break, some time focussing on my rock climbing, some time focussing on Dungeons and Dragons (I ran the Curse of Strahd campaign for a group of friends) and most importantly some time focussing on my family. It ended up being a little over a year, where I did nothing more than regular site maintenance of kwmassage.com. In my time away from coding, I also moved my massage therapy practice into my home and did two major home renovations.
Im early 2020 and I was starting to wonder how I was going to find the time to get back into development. I had two big rock climbing trips planned for the spring. Both to the Red Rock Canyon in Nevada. The first trip was with my two teenage daughters. They have been climbing with me since they were 3 years old and this was going to be a great way to express ourselves as a family.The trip second was with Aaron, a good friend and climbing partner, we wanted to make an attempt at the Original Route on Rainbow wall, 1300 feet of 5.12 trad climbing. The Rainbow Wall is a challenge that stands a little over my head and therefore I was training a lot. A lot! But the itch to start coding was starting to creep back in, how was I going to find the time.
But the itch to start coding was starting to creep back in, how was I going to find the time.
In March of 2020 Covid-19 came into our lives. Like everyone it turned everything in my life upside down. Climbing trips got cancelled, massage therapy practices get shut down, the climbing gyms can’t operate and I have an unprecedented amount of free time. I’m unemployed for the first time in my adult life and I have no idea when I can go back to work. Time to start coding and time to start building my resume. I knew it was going to be a hard sell, no professional experience, no computer science degree, just a bunch of amateur projects and online courses. But if nothing else, I’m determined, I’m willing to work hard and I had lots of time to sharpen my skills and learn. All I needed was the opportunity to demonstrate my skills to the right person.
But if nothing else, I’m determined, I’m willing to work hard and I had lots of time to sharpen my skills and learn.
I had some help putting my resume together. I updated my projects to the latest version of Ruby and Rails and got them live on Heroku. Then I started a crash course in Javascript to get my skills back. Wes Bos was recommended by a friend as a guy who makes useful coding courses and I started his Javascript30, a 30 day Javascript bootcamp. The same friend also suggested that the CSS for my Dungeons and Dragons app was awful and I should at least unglue it from the top left corner. For this I needed a quick refresher with my CSS so I also did the Wes Bos CSS-Grid course. CSS is an easy concept on the surface, add a class or id to your HTML tag then write instructions for how everything inside that HTML tag should look, no problem. There’s some trickier stuff like translations and transformation but that’s what reference material is for(Stack Overflow, I’m talking about you). But positioning, getting that div to sit right where you want it has been a struggle for me. I don’t know if it’s that CSS Grid is that much more powerful or if it’s just that I understand it better but with CSS-Grid I feel like I have so much more control over my web design.
After seeing how CSS-Grid is changing the way I look at layouts I’d wanted to learn Flex box but for the next while I was going to focus on adding some new functionality to my D&D app. I’ve found an API that allows access to the D&D source reference material that Wizards of the Coast has open sourced, Ill be able to add a lot of content to my existing offering with this. For the future I was also really interested in ReactJs.
I will stay focused, continue to work hard and look forward to new possibilities.
I had never had so much time to focus on my coding skills and I really enjoyed the dedicated time. So far, I’ve had no bites on my resume. In the middle of a pandemic, networking has been a little hard but the people I have connected with have been extremely encouraging and very kind. The Covid lock down was a strange time and I can see how a hiring company might not be in the position to take a risk with my resume over one with a more proven track record, no matter what my potential is. I will stay focused, continue to work hard and look forward to new possibilities.