Another week is over! A few wounds, a few battle scars and a couple trophies. Time for recovery and retrospective.
The Good
- I almost finished the feature I was working on. This will allow my colleagues to generate a report in Atlassian Confluence at the click of a button in a frontend app. The backend will get some data from the DB in AWS, collate it and create the report in Confluence by calling its API.
It felt satisfying to see the feature through to its end. This included:
- React frontend code to send request to the Node.js backend
- Backend code to interact with AWS. In this case, it will add a message to a queue in SQS
- Tests for both frontend/backend code
- SQS will trigger a Lambda function that will retrieve and process data from a DynamoDB table, and finally make a POST request to the Atlassian Confluence API. I used the Confluence.js package to simplify things. It also got me to implement Lambda Layers, which I hadn't done before.
The Bad
- Never enough time to do and/or learn all the things I'd like to. I've managed to complete the CompTIA Project+ exam preparation course and it was a good start. I'm eternally grateful to my company for supporting my learning and upskilling efforts. I'm now going to switch to the book and will be creating Anki flashcards at the same time. This should give me a solid foundation for the exam, which I hope to take in a month or so.
- I haven't been writing as often as I wanted to. Some workdays left me devoid of any additional energy and I had to prioritise rest and recovery. The same goes for other learning apart from Project+ material. I plan to dedicate half of my day on Sunday to more work on Frontend Mentor challenges to keep working on my CSS skills.
The Ugly
- The Lambda code that processes the data was more complex than I had initially envisioned. It took a few iterations to get it right. As always, proper planning in pseudocode was paramount.
- Documentation for certain APIs is never as exhaustive as you'd like it to be. Integrating with tutorials, videos and articles, where possible, is a good idea. Sometimes, you might just need to experiment and learn by trial and error, though.
Thoughts
This chapter in my career feels frustrating as I feel I'm not progressing as fast or as much as I'd like to, despite still learning new things regularly.
I feel as if I'm accumulating XP's in a videogame but I haven't yet hit that threshold that will let me reach the next level, with the resulting increase in stats, new skill points to distribute and maybe even a new perk to pick.
(The above paragraph likely betrays by background as a gamer)
I'm following my study plan diligently, but the pile of things to learn only seems to grow more and more and although that is, in many ways, a great thing, it can also bring with it a certain sense of potential defeat. I guess it's a matter of switching perspectives.
How has your week been and what have you been working on?
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