Oh, how much I love the festive season. My days were filled with peaceful sleeping in, staying up late, doing chores in between and a whole lot of gaming. University did number on me, so I took a long-deserved break from coding.

It took me about two weeks to start feeling in the mood to programme again, but now I'm finally back at it again. Even though I love gaming and staying up late and sleeping in, it's nowhere near as satisfying as working on my little projects. On that note, I hope to take this energy with me as I go on into 2022. Without further ado, let's get onto the usual business

Where am I? 🗺️

Well, still a student... I haven't given my career much thought lately because I see myself studying for at least the next two to three years. I wasn't too flattered with my most recent results. I can sit here and make excuses, but I'm going to take ownership of this one. A lot was out of my control, but that didn't stop me from winning in other areas of my life, so I should do better next time.

I also extended my Wi-Fi. The entire process did make me consider a more hardware related career. I'm great at troubleshooting and all that. I was also the tech guy for my house at Uni, but I never enjoyed it, to be honest. The process of installing the cables and configuring the router was nothing fancy. In short, I'm not particularly keen on going down the hardware route, but I'll keep an open mind in the future because I don't know what the day to day of a network technician looks like. It might be better than I imagined.

What am I learning? 🧠

I haven't taken the time to learn anything this month for obvious reasons. But I have been thinking about what I'd like to learn next to expand my toolbox. I want to learn how to use Adobe illustrator. I know that it is entirely different from the applications I'm used to using, but I want to create vector graphics for this blog and possibly other websites that I intend on building.

Come to think of it, there's a NodeJS and React course on Udemy that I still haven't finished- said every developer ever. I started them and got pretty far but gave up when school started. All that's left on the React course is to learn Redux. I never fully understood the first time around and just gave up. I hope I have more energy to keep pushing this time around. All that's left on the NodeJS is authentication and sending emails. All that would come in handy for features that I could implement in a personal project.

What am I building? 👨🏾‍💻

Instagram app

I'm still trying to get a website to work for an old friend. I've been working on it since March. So much time has passed I think they even forgot that I was still making it, or at least trying to. I've made so much progress, but I've hit one of the biggest snags I could ever hit — a CORS error.

I've found quite a few workarounds on Stack overflow and blogging sites. The best solution I've found is to create a proxy server, and that sounds like it will take a lot of time to do because I'm not sure if I have the skillset to make one. I'm not sure I have what it takes to complete this project anymore.

Contributed to a friend's Github

Even though I didn't get the other project to work, I did implement a search feature in a website for a friend. They had it on their Github, so I could pull it and push and everything. It was so satisfying. I've wanted to find people who I can code alongside for the longest time, and even though we didn't do the entire project together, the idea of building code with someone else just geeks me out. It's one small step towards becoming a developer.

All that being said, I'm not sure if I'll continue to contribute. It was nice being able to help out, but I just don't have an incentive to build it out cause it's not my project. Then it hit me. That's why it's not so easy to find other coders to code with. There is very little incentive, if any, involved.

Newsflash

• My room is no longer a Wi-Fi dead zone.
• I contributed to a Github repo that was not my own.
• I got my first jab
• Spent NYE with friends for the first time! 2021 has been my best year yet. My current trajectory brings me an uncontainable excitement for the year ahead. I hope you had a wonderful festive season and I wish you a prosperous new year. And as always, thanks for the read, and Happy Coding!💻