Sleep? Forget it pal, this CSS isn't gonna write itself.
Monday's project was perfect for a Monday. It was a metaphor for Monday itself. Stressful and neverending, with sub-optimal results. Not exactly due to CSS though. But seriously, CSS can become a serious time sink if you are trying to get all the details right. Are the buttons supposed to have rounded corners? Better get in there are add a border-radius. And that button should be green but not "green". Better get the color wheel out and choose the best green. And why isn't this div lining up evenly overtop this other div?
5 hours later and my AJAX calls are still not working but my styles are pretty good.
And this is how I ended the day. With a nicely styled non-functioning site. Its like a Kitchenaid mixer with no motor. Sure you can show it off to your friends when they come to visit but if they ask you to put it to use you'll have to come up with some lame excuse about how you'd totally do that except you aren't allowed to on account of it being a Monday and you've got so many other chores to do.
Over the weekend I got to dabble a small bit in Redux, which paid off as I was able to keep up with lectures today. Conceptually I get Redux and the idea of Middleware, Providers and Connect and mapStateToProps, and all the benefits of using Redux. But I'm no expert and I'm still wrapping my head around it. I'm sure we will go over it again today. And tomorrow, and every day up to the weekend.
That Redux is tricky to implement has been a huge hurdle in class though. Our instructor is very good and has been programming for years. That said, he is able to come up with examples of how to use Redux on the fly and present them to us in class. The problem is that there are dozens of ways that something can go wrong. Even something as small as a missing semicolon can lead to a treasure-hunt of looking for the culprit. A big chunk of Monday's lecture on Redux was lost because of one missing initialState setting. For me, I get distracted and cannot keep up with lectures during debugging sessions like that. Its like I'm learning, but then I have to go back and unlearn something and relearn a new thing. That stop-start feeling takes me out of learning mode and gets frustrating. Most of coding is debugging so those moments could be learning moments too, but I get easily distracted. Especially if it lasts longer than a minute or two.
Grabbing data from an API should be so easy. Which leads me to believe I am missing one small piece somewhere that, when plugged in, will fill my site with all that data I've been waiting for. And once I get all that data to appear, I can get back to my CSS.
