My February In Code
Tags: webdev, productivity, career
Published: 2021-03-02 20:02:04

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title: My February In Code
published: true
description: 
tags: webdev, productivity, career
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---

It's that time of the month: time for accountability. What did I get done in February?

# What I Studied/Learned

I temporarily renewed my [Frontend Masters](https://frontendmasters.com/dashboard/) subscription and went....slightly overboard there, going through their courses on:

- Angular 9 Fundamentals
- Production-Grade Angular
- Enterprise Architecture Patterns
- Design Systems with React and Storybook
- Website Accessibility, 
- Introduction to Next.js

February also saw the rerelease of Wes Bos's [Advanced React and GraphQL](https://advancedreact.com/) course, redone with the latest version of Apollo and Keystone.js as the back-end. Since I'm making Apollo a priority of mine, I was glad to see that I had a pretty strong grasp on it, but there were still some nice tricks for me to learn here (I can't believe I didn't know about [renaming restructured variables](https://wesbos.com/destructuring-renaming)...). 

# What I Read

This month, I read [You Don't Know JS Yet: Scope and Closures]() by Kyle Simpson. It was.....fine? This is the second edition of this book, and I read both editions concurrently. I'm not a big fan of Kyle: He clearly has unusually deep knowledge of how JavaScript works, but I think his explanations are a lot more long-winded than they need to be. This was short but not enjoyable for me, and I feel like I do better with other sources for this sort of deep JS learning.

# What I Wrote

I published a new blog entry about [what you need to know before you start learning code](https://dev.to/dylanesque/what-you-need-to-know-before-you-start-learning-code-1f6j), which I'm pretty happy with. I'm seeing more movement in my aim to have a path for new developers that reduces decision fatigue and wasted time, and there are more entries following this one coming out very soon!

# What I Built

I built less actual code this month than I had in a long time. Looking at my commits, I seem to be limited to:

- Making some UI improvements and updating the seed database to reflect changes in the source game for my [RPG tracking app](https://github.com/dylanesque/MPQChampApp)

- Beginning the basics of a [blog](https://github.com/dylanesque/Metal-Detector) to be done using WordPress + Gatsby.

# How Did I Do This Month?

Honestly, not that great? February is a tough month in New England at the best of times, and "smack in the middle of a pandemic" is a big hindrance to boot. Having said that, I would like my resume or online presence to be slightly more impressive than it was in the previous month every month, and I really don't have much to *show* for February, and I don't want that to happen again.

# What's Up For March?

This is what I would like to get done in March, at a minimum.

- Write a few integration and E2E tests for my main app. Also, use my improved understanding of Apollo and Next.js to clean up some of the messier parts and add some basic error handling.
- Read and take notes on [Effective TypeScript](https://effectivetypescript.com/)
- Have UX/UI notes on my Metal Detector blog, and possibly some tests in Storybook
- Start studying for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Exam