I was looking forward to getting back to working regularly but I was unsure of my skills. This was a new area for me. Most of my past jobs I picked up the flow pretty quickly and the tasks weren’t overly difficult. This was going to be different though, I had the basic skills but there were going to be additional skills that I would have to learn.
The first thing that I would have to get used to would be using a windows laptop. I had been using a Mac all through the Careers In Code bootcamp and everyday after that up until the point of getting the job. I still used my Mac at home for my personal projects everyday but the switching between the two took some time.
My first two months consisted of learning Angular and Ionic. I had learned React in the bootcamp. Watching videos and coding along to the project 8 hours a day actually took a little bit of a toll on me. A person can only retain so much information at a time. Sitting in front of a computer for 60 days trying to learn something on your own, well, it can make you a little grouchy. Then to makes matters a little out of sorts, within my first two weeks of working, the pandemic hit.
Learning Angular wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t exactly fun either. It uses an HTML file , a CSS file and a Typescript(TS) file instead of a Javascript(JS) file. There is a huge debate about using Javascript versus Typescript but I’m not here to get into that. I am here to let you know my experiences using Typescript. In my opinion it takes some time to learn how to use TS to its fullest capability. I know there is a lot more that I can learn about TS, at this point it’s a matter of when I will have the time. Angular allows you to make single page applications like React. They both have similar features in what they can do, yet are different. For instance, Angular uses a real DOM (document object management) where React uses a virtual DOM. Angular uses two-way data binding and React uses one-way data binding. There are other differences but it’s ultimately up to you and what your application will need that depends on which one you should use.
Ionic was just as equally the same when it came to learning it, not terrible but not exactly fun. Ionic was used in the way that some might use Bootstrap. I thought it was a little odd to use another framework for styling but that’s what the company was using so that’s what I learned. I have never tried to create an application in strictly Ionic even though it is possible. Maybe some day I will try it.
Once I got through the first two months of videos, I was finally able to start doing some coding for the company. I worked on a few things in the beginning, little things that needed to be done to existing applications that had already been created.
I was doing all of this while trying to adjust to all the changes of the pandemic as well. It felt odd to be going to work when most people were no longer working or they were working from home. I was super grateful that I still had a job. The company was very understanding and let me work from home one day a week in the beginning so I could make sure my child was doing there work, since school was 100% virtual at that point.
The company was very vigilant in trying to keep everyone safe. While most companies had shut down or went completely remote, we had managed to stay in the office until November of 2020. I worked from home for a little over 3 months when they finally let us come back to the office full time with a few changes.
So what did I do during all that time? You will have to find out in the next “episode” what I was doing at work, what I was learning, how I was coping through the pandemic and how things all worked out when I was working from home and went back to the office. Mad? Sorry, I can’t give everything away. How else am I supposed to get you to come back and read how my story continues with all its twists and turns along with the trials and tribulations. Until next time my friends.
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