Day1 - What I do during the day

I decided to start blogging my daily activity to help with my reflective process.
I am currently job hunting and also trying to keep productive so this blog is going to be my reflective end of day statement.

Okay so let's begin, I started the day off focused and ready...
Scratch that, let's start with where I am at and why this is important.

Three weeks ago I graduated from flat iron bootcamp. I am now trying to get my first developer job, I learnt about React, Redux, Javascript, Ruby , Rails and general coding skills. Now I am trying to prove to the world I have what it takes to be a professional. Part of that process involves making sure I have an upto date linkedIn page, I am actively writing job applications and keeping track of my time.

This is where this blog comes in. As well as job hunting I am also trying to practise for coding interviews.. This is where my day usually begins, except not today.

I got up around 8-30- 9am and gave my darling wife a goodbye kiss, then the productivity began. First thing, pour myself a bowl of cereal and put the kettle on...
The night before I had been doing some SoloLearn CSS and I was hoping to put some of that into practise. I have also been watching Adobe Illustrator tutorials. So whilst eating my breakfast I put on a tutorial I had watched the other day and just skimmed through it again before opening the app up and finishing off a little logo project I had been working on over the weekend.

Then the usual routine of check emails and drink tea. I had some messages on LinkedIn to attend to so they came next. After that I was ready to get back into the illustrator learning. I watched a few more tutorials and tried out some new techniques. Having only just got into Illustrator I am really excited at its capability and the creative freedom it gives me. After getting some practise in it was on to some more pressing matters.

For the last 2 weeks I have been engaged in the Shopify Partners platform. I wanted to give it a go and start building some websites using the shopify platform, at first I tried building something in React hoping I could upload it but then found out you can only use their own themes. So I had to learn all about Shopify Liquid Themes. This was a whole other world of web development but overall I kinda get a good feel for it, however I don't really think it's very good especially coming from a place where I could build really fast apps using react and redux, fortunately Shopify does have a Storefront API that would allow a developer to build a site and host it elsewhere and just connect to the shopify system for checkout and orders. Pretty decent and if I was going to use shopify for real this is the route I would go. However being hard headed, aka stubborn I wanted to develop sites using liquid. So I found some tutorials on youtube and gave it a go.

It was a disaster...
Stick to the pre built themes, shopify can be a bit of a pain. I am still going to keep hacking away but one of the biggest hurdles is the fact that you can't really do any offline developing with the shopify platform, they have a blank template called Slate which is what they expect you to start with. It seems overly bloated but I guess it's because they want to make sure all the basic functionality of th e-commerce site is already in the template. Since it needs to connect to the shopify server for product information it is difficult to develop a nice offline workflow. Maybe some other time..

What I really want out of my job search though is a strong team with good mentors who can guide me and shape me. So after the shopify fiddling it was time to search for jobs, I didn't apply for too many today. I had a little browse on LinkedIn and wrote a couple of emails, I am not feeling the cold call side of job applications. I'm pretty sure if I get an interview anywhere I will do okay but cold calling across the internet just ain't doing it for me. Time will reveal what will be..

I had some lunch and got back onto youtube, I watched a couple of UX/UI videos from TheFutur and think I learnt a few tips and techniques. Then I felt a little bit screen blasted so i sat down with my guitar and started putting some chords together, I wrote a little verse and had a little sing song to myself, that was satisfying. Then it was back into the grind.
I rounded off by trying to solve a kata over at codewars. If anyone wants to know more it was called String incrementer it's a level 5 kata.

And that is the end of my day for now...