3h All day long I had the creeping feeling like I am outrunning my lessons. I mean I feel like I need to implement on my own more of what I am doing, because otherwise I’m just writing notes and then forgetting it in a few days. The last week I have covered a lot of ground with react and redux, then sass, bootstrap and jQuery. I don’t expect to know the last three off the top of my head yet, but I do think that I need to know react and redux really well. Tonight I listened to the second half of a Complete Developer podcast largely about the benefits of conferences and local meetups. That brings up an interesting question I have been meaning to figure out. Why does Boston have (i guess) the largest python user group in the country and yet it doesn’t have a vanilla js user group? I see react / redux / all other sorts of libraries or frameworks but I don’t see any larger more inclusive group.

Getting back to what I worked on: I started on a tiny stub of a demo that somehow pulls in the mbta schedule. I know the api well enough to do it. I just need to clear out the cobwebs because the last 2 times I did this I was following directions. Now I’m making the directions. Since I just did two redux tutorials I’m also having a hard time remembering how to deal with promises in pure react. I’ll figure it out.

Since I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed lately it is becoming more important to set good goals and break off tiny pieces of them to work on. Otherwise I get bogged down pretty quickly. That’s no fun for anyone!

I also read a Launch Academy overview of the Slack Overflow developer survey and they mentioned that vscode is the most prevalent editor out there, with 34.9% of respondents. The second place spot was Visual Studio, then Notepad++, and then sublime. That surprised me. I have one friend who recently switched to VS Code and he loves it. I’ll be a little sad to be going closed source, but I also want to use the right tool for the job. I’ll have to give it a shot and see what’s up.