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Zach
Zach

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Blue Ocean Wrap-Up and Post-HR Thoughts

Blue Ocean

I've more-or-less wrapped up my Blue Ocean Contribution. It feels good. I don't think I made any game-breaking contributions to this project, but I'm proud of my execution on the responsibilities I was tasked with - to animate our logo and then to build the map-display for the search results.

Tomorrow we present our project.

Post-HR Thoughts

Growing my skills

There's a lot to unpack here.

Something I've been thinking about in the past day or so is my tech debt list. There are so many topics I want to revisit, to explore, the understand deeply, to add to my repertoire.

How do I even approach this? A few ways have crossed my mind:

  • What skills are in demand?
  • What skills are the most impressive?
  • What projects should I build?
  • Toy problems - how much should I study?
  • What are other people doing?

There are probably a billion blog posts out there that answer these questions and maybe I'll read them. I definitely plan on canvassing my classmates and maybe even members of the previous cohort - the 'Seniors' to my classmates 'Juniors'.

I'm sure Career Services has answers to these and probably other staff members as well.

I certainly have my own list. Some of those things:

  • A CSS Framework the Material UI or Bootstrap, or maybe something like Chokra that's tied to React.

  • Another front-end framework like Angular or Vue. Maybe I should just go deeper on React. I'm not a huge fan of React. Maybe it was the first experience I had with it at HR (which was a very unpleasant experience), but I'm still not a fan. Maybe building my own light-weight framework would be something cool to try.

  • Project-wise, I still believe in the blog project and what it can bring to Bootcamp students and other coders.

  • Complex queries (joins, aggregate functions etc) in Mongo/Mongoose and PSQL.

  • Next is a strong contender for study/project use. We used it in Blue Ocean. It looks awesome, but I haven't really gotten to interact with or explore it beyond seeing its routing in action.

  • Client-Side vs Server-Side Rendering. I don't really get SSR and its advantages.

  • Front-End Optimization

  • Just setting up a better workstation. Second monitor, new computer possibly, maybe just fixing up my current laptop. A new desk chair?

Edit: Let's see if this turns into a running list. Here are some additional topics I consider important:

  • Testing
  • Websockets
  • Async

Free time and flexible schedules

What's the life of an engineer like? What kind of hours can I expect to put in? I'm sure that varies wildly depending on the company and team.

I want to ski this winter. Will I be able to create a two-hour gap in my schedule during the week?

I want to coach High School basketball - how involved can I be in that?

It also depends on the job location. Can I be remote? If I have to relocate for work, both of those things are off the table this year.

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