Yes, it has been a month since my last post. I hope you had a great Halloween.
Anyways, here is an update on what I have been doing this past month.
Interviews
I had several interviews for different positions. Some were not even technically heavy positions, but more business-oriented. Most of these interviews were for jobs that I applied for months ago and forgot about and I spent a lot of time researching these companies and these positions to make sure I knew what I was getting into during the actual interviews. While there were some rejections, I remain hopeful for the remaining responses I have yet to receive.
It was also a surprise to get interviews for jobs outside my time zone. I had an interview with a recruiter that was working in the United Kingdom, so my interview was scheduled for the early morning. I also learned that even though I applied for Senior Software Developer positions, I was told that the company was also looking for Junior-level positions, even though they did not originally have those positions available on their job postings at the time.
Deployment
I was able to deploy my group's first project. It was a lot of time spent making this and I learned a lot building it with my fellow members at Brridge. If I could take anything out of this, it would be that I need to set up the application's folders properly for deployment before going deep into the project. Let me tell you that while I was reorganizing the folders on the main branch, I was scared out of my wits. It was months of work and I was afraid of messing it up at the very last moment. Fortunately, deploying it on Heroku was a success! All the environment variables were implemented perfectly. The backend is working properly with the frontend. Everything works as it should and I am happy that it is live.
One thing I learned is that Heroku needs to have HTTP requests made with relative paths rather than hard-coded ones. For example, we were using "localhost:5000/post" to make our requests. In order for Heroku to work properly, I needed to remove most of it and just leave it as "/post". When I went over the whole project and revised it with the changes, it worked perfectly!
Side Project
In regards to the Overwatch project, I have decided to hold it off. With the development of Overwatch 2, I assumed that the original game would halt, in terms of development. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Even now, the development team is working on patches and balancing changes to characters in the game, which hinders my progress and planning for my application. Having said that, I am still working on a new application that I would like to call "Perishables".
Perishables is an application where you list perishable items, along with their expiration dates, and the application will notify you when an item expires. It is a very simple application with a real specific purpose: organized shopping.
It has become apparent with the pandemic that you need to think ahead when it comes to getting supplies from the grocery stores. Earlier in the pandemic, you would avoid unnecessary grocery shopping to prevent unneeded contact with other people as possible. As such, you need to know what you have and how long they are good for so that you can better plan the next trip. It is also important to just keep track of what food has expired. It is a huge problem to stuff your refrigerator with food pushed in the back and then forgetting about them weeks later only to find out that they have gone bad by the time you finally get to pulling them out. As such, I thought it would be a good idea for my next side project. Also, I get really frustrated when stuff I buy go to waste, especially milk.
I decided to make this a full stack application because:
- It would definitely look good on my portfolio.
- I forgot how to build one from scratch.
Even though I was able to help create and deploy a full stack application, I almost completely forgot how I started it. So I thought, what better way to practice the fundamentals than to literally start from square one and making a new application from the ground up.
Self-care
I cannot express how important it is to take a break from preparing for interviews, learning, coding, working, etc... I take time for myself to cook, clean, exercise and relax. I bought some new games for my Nintendo Switch, such as Bravely Default II, and I finished a couple of series, like Squid Game, on Netflix. I also spent some quality time with my friends from high school outside.
Given the current circumstances, it's especially important to not stay sitting on a desk for hours on end every day. I have developed irritating tension headaches because of it. Remember to stand up for 5 minutes every hour you sit. Also, it is not just a matter of physical stress, it's also psychological. If you are focused on a task, try not to think about it during your break and do something to take your mind off it, like closing your eyes and doing some box breathing.
In conclusion, the grind is real, but I am trying not to burn myself out too much.