Life As A Bootcamp Dev - Week 8: The Importance Of Resolve
Tags: career, jobs, life
Published: 2020-03-23 04:33:36

# The Past Week

[Last week](https://dev.to/shawnhuangfernandes/life-as-a-bootcamp-dev-week-7-long-term-4lj0) has come and gone, and being in the midst of what looks like the beginning of a recession due to COVID, I've tried to keep my head down, stay positive, and keep myself busy. Networking is very hard, but being cooped up at home **gave me an opportunity to really focus on building my tech skills**. My week is reflective of that:

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/2t5kvqz2an3f6q8bmojv.png)

## Summary

To be frank, **it's been rough**:
- People are losing their jobs (which sucks), and means there's more people looking for work
- People (recruiters especially) are really hard to get responses from
- Hiring freezes are becoming a thing of the present, and it's becoming harder to find opportunities
- Socializing with people in-person (something I love) is not an option, so much of my presence and interactions are through the internet
- We've had some scares within my immediate community with COVID, which is unnerving

But there are some **cup-half-fulls** too:
- It's very clear that I picked the right partner, we've spent literally 2 full weeks (24 hours) around each other (she's working from home) and it's been so much fun (asides from stress of the job hunt/COVID).
- I get entire days to work on projects, research new technologies, or do my job prep with literally no chance of distractions
- It's been a wake up call for our household on how we prepare for emergencies
- I learned about GarageBand (I now realize why iPads are used for parenting)

![alt text](https://media.giphy.com/media/B1rJf5dyhrhVS/giphy.gif)

## The Game Plan From Last Week

Here were my todos from last week, with the more interesting talking points in bold.

- Send out 10 applications for "Junior Software Developer" roles
- Message/Follow Up with at least 15 recruiters or software devs
- **Continue working on Personae**
- **Continue working on Play It Forward**
- Do 10 algorithms
- Do 1 whiteboard practice problem
- Cover a couple chapters from Cracking The Coding Interview
- **Draw something, or just do something NOT tech related**

## Continue Working On Personae

This week in Personae, my deliverable for the week was to implement backend authentication and do a slight refactor of the rails models to allow us to scale the application down the road. 

After doing my model refactor, I tested the functionality out in my seeds file using ```console rails c```. Yay! Using my prior Flatiron experience, the plethora of blogs, and documentation, I also got my user authentication working as well! Marked off our team Trello board and moved onto my other stuff for the week!

## Continue Working on Play It Forward

This was a really fun and challenging week in Play It Forward. I was charging ahead and trying to really get our rough application views working so we could play with the GraphQL/Hasura backend that Jen had built. At this point, I'd been playing with Tailwind and React for long enough that I had developed a strategy to quickly whip out some views in a methodical way.

- Create the page as a component in my pages folder
- Divide the mockup for that view into reusable components, and create them

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/7e09s901qs8jhvuvottx.png)

- In the page container component, add divs to structure the page to the appropriate layout
```react
import React from 'react';

import Navbar from '../components/Navbar'
import AuthWindow from '../components/AuthWindow'

// Layout
// Navbar, AuthWindow
const AuthPage = () => {
    return (
        <div className="auth-page w-screen h-screen">
            {/* Navbar */}
            <Navbar />

            <div className="auth-page-body flex h-full justify-center items-center">
                {/* AuthWindow */}
                <AuthWindow />
            </div>
        </div>
    );
};

export default AuthPage;
```
- Add one component into the page at a time, and test it to make sure it works. In this case I was building the AuthWindow component rendered above.

```react
import React, { useState } from "react";

import LoginDialogueBox from "./LoginDialogueBox"
import SignUpDialogueBox from "./SignUpDialogueBox"

// ClickableTabs (x2), LoginBody || SignUpBody
const AuthWindow = () => {
  const [loginTabbed, setLoginTabbed] = useState(true);
  const [isVolunteer, setIsVolunteer] = useState(true);

  const tabHeaderClass = "flex text-white justify-center items-center w-6/12 h-12 ";
  const selected = "bg-blue-500";
  const unSelected = "bg-blue-600";

  return (
    <div className="auth-page-window flex flex-col h-80 w-9/12 bg-red-400">
      {/* Clickable Tabs */}
      <div className="flex">
        <div className={tabHeaderClass + (loginTabbed ? selected : unSelected)} onClick={() => setLoginTabbed(true)}>
          Login
        </div>
        <div className={tabHeaderClass + (loginTabbed ? unSelected : selected)} onClick={() => setLoginTabbed(false)}>
          Signup
        </div>
      </div>

      {/* LoginBody || SignUpBody */}
      {loginTabbed ? <LoginDialogueBox isVolunteer={isVolunteer} setIsVolunteer={setIsVolunteer}/> : <SignUpDialogueBox isVolunteer={isVolunteer} setIsVolunteer={setIsVolunteer}/>}
    </div>
  );
};

export default AuthWindow;
```
- Then you get Jen's opinion how how it looks, and see if it needs tweaks

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/x36k0ynhugexaybaw48g.png)

Building UIs this week was really fun. I learned a LOT about CSS from using Tailwind's utility-driven library, and I also began converting components into Typescript with Jen's help! Most of all, I became a lot more confident with managing using state and props as well. **Currently all the views are built for mobile, so next week I will be making the UI responsive for desktop as well**!

## Draw Something (or just DON'T code)

Because I've been drawing animations and images for Play It Forward. I decided I'd take a small break from coding during the week and practice my drawing. I particularly was interested in just getting my hands on a pencil (or apple pen?) and putting my brain on a page. 

In the **spirit of feeling grateful for the good things we do have**, despite the challenges of the job hunt, My partner helped me come up with this.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/3ons5n7u7c88vagr9bov.png)

This is actually a title page for a secret thing I'm doing, but I'll tell you more about that later down the road ;).

Good luck with your own endeavors!
Shawn