What does a Friday look like for me, a Software Engineer who isn't really employed as one... I mean, I've had multiple freelance clients and I'm a contract Front End Developer for a Twitch Streamer, but I have not broken into tech just yet. So my days all kind of look exactly the same right now: part time job, gym, coding/learning/studying, sleep, repeat.
07:00 AM - 1:30 PM: I worked my usual shift at the animal hospital today. We were extremely short-staffed, and I was taking rooms (patient cases) by myself until 10:30... It was slightly stressful having multiple cases to handle at once, especially because the veterinarian that I work under can get overstimulated/overwhelmed quickly. She is an amazing, extremely passionate and intelligent doctor, but she definitely gets quite neurotic and it causes a heightened sense of anxiety. However, due to my organizational skills, I was able to keep her on track with each room, where in diagnostics we were, and I used carefully paced and mindful syntax to offer her straightforward answers and solutions. Though it required quite a bit of running around for me, I just turned on a fan and focused in.
When I got home, I ate a quick, meal-prepped lunch and got into my gym clothes. However, as I was getting ready to leave, I had a stressful conversation with the car warranty people about what's going on with my car...
* Sidenote *
In May, I got badly rear ended during a stop on I-95. I was stopped and a vehicle smashed into while going ~70 MPH. My car (that I had for 3 years, that was completely paid off) was totaled. Now, as someone who works a part time job, lives with her parents (doesn't pay for rent or groceries), but can barely pay her bills, this was not good timing for me. Plus the stress of learning completely new skills every day, the anxiety of trying to break into tech and feel secure in my career, on top of the mid-20's identity crisis about healing trauma's, finding oneself, stabilizing a social/romantic life (in this generation?? l o l yeah right), etc.......the last thing I needed was my car to be taken from me.
Well, fast forward to now, I am still in the middle of a lawsuit against his insurance company. But around the end of June, I used my total loss check of ~$14,000 and put a down payment on a 2015 Scion FR-S. It's an older car, but I didn't think I'd be keeping it for more than a year anyways, so I thought I'd go for it and have a cute little sports car. Well, about 2.5 weeks into having it, I experienced not one...but TWO tires that exploded on me. Both times on the interstate. Both times involved a highly stressful weekend of tow trucks, expensive rental cars, and large repair bills... Then, as if things couldn't get worse, the motor began making weird clicking noises and my entire car was shaking. After taking it to the Toyota dealership and putting $1,000 more of repairs into my car, a week later, the issue persisted... (What the hell did I pay the $1,000 for??? And what the hell is up with my luck...) I brought my car back to the dealership for them to actually fix the issue this time, but the dealership has been going back and forth with my car's warranty people about my warranty covering the repairs, because the bill is coming out to be ~$6,000 and I quite literally do not have the money to fix my car, and the repairs were deemed warranty-coverable. It has been a MONTH since I have had a car... but in reality, it's been three months because I did not even have my Scion for three weeks before it began breaking down.
* End sidenote *
Anyways, because of the phone call about my car, I felt really hot and sick, which can happen when I get highly... and I mean highly stressed. It takes a lot for me to get pulled of my positive, ~peaceful~ mindset... so I knew that feeling like this needed to be dealt with graciously. I decided I should rest from the gym today. I was already waddling around the hospital because my muscles were so sore, so I figured I could use my time to focus on web development.
3:00 PM to 6:00 PM: I updated my bio on linkedin to include a few new languages into the "technologies I use", such as Typescript, Tailwind, EJS, and Shopify. I also updated my experience section by adding the contract position I have with Reversah. I spent the rest of this time block resume building. I went through tons of sample resume's and borrowed verbiage that I liked and placed all the ideas into a document. I also saved screenshots of a few resume's for inspiration. Tomorrow, I plan to rebuild my entire resume using all of the inspo I gathered.
Then I spent some time on FreeCodeCamp, catching up on my JavaScript, Algorithms, and Data Structures curriculum. Sometimes, it's repetitive and a bit simple, but other times, I feel like I'm learning a concept in a new way, and it's super helpful. It's a plus that I get to practice spaced repetition on concepts I may already know, and if there are concepts that I'm not fully comfortable with, I'm getting to practice them.
Tomorrow, I plan to spend my Saturday watching some courses on React so I can feel comfortable enough to get my 100 hours project started. So, I began to prepare myself for learning some more React with these resources:
Web Dev Simplified's "Do You Know Enough JavaScript To Learn React" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR9wsVYp8RQ
Kenny Gunderman's "How I learned React JS in 7 Days" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaUj-NCDu7c
Nicole Chung's "5 things to learn before learning React" https://www.oreilly.com/content/5-things-to-learn-before-learning-react/
David Yu's "What I wish I knew when I started to work with React.js" https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-i-wish-i-knew-when-i-started-to-work-with-react-js-3ba36107fd13/
V50's "5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Learning React.js" https://vault50.com/5-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-learning-react-js/
"Top 5 Skills You Must Know Before You Learn React.js" https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/top-5-skills-you-must-know-before-you-learn-reactjs/
Now, its 10:00 PM and I'm spending the rest of my fabulous Friday night brushing up on Object-Oriented Programming through CodeCademy's "Learn Intermediate JavaScript" course.
I won't be sharing today's blog anywhere. I think I enjoyed writing this one just for my own accountability, and to reassure myself that I used my time wisely today. Sometimes, I can spend hours working and when I've finished, I feel like I've not done enough... it's nice to have most of my tasks compiled in one place so I can look at my progress overall and see that I did use my time effectively.. and that what I did was enough.
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