We have officially entered the three month run-up period to the company's annual flagship conference event. There is certainly a feeling of industry going on around the office: more scheduled meetings, more impromptu meetings and as I will come to find, more last minute high priority tasks given by other teams to support them. It's this period where we divert attention away from the website maintenance and more on providing data entry support and odd jobs here and there so the preparations for the event are in place for it to run smoothly.
Since I've been at the organisation, there has been quite a lot of resource restructuring and a few new faces and names to remember. It highlights the sad but inevitable fact about work culture in this country and not specific to development sphere: people come and go, it will affect the dynamic of those who remain and you will find yourself in challenging situations taking on more responsibilities than your original job description entails. How you approach these challenges is up to you, and try to appreciate that all of the experiences are learning opportunities which you can market and leverage the lessons learned for yourself in the future. So, there is much to gain with change!
On the work side of things, the majority of the time has been involved in coming to an amicable coded solution for an issue that I have been collaborating on for five or six weeks now (I've lost exact count). Hopefully, this will get resolved soon, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was deferred due to other pressing matters in the company.
Other stuff I have been dealing with is tutorial-hell on Drupal and learning the intricacies of theme building, Drupal hooks and the setup for css and js libraries. I still feel learning by doing will reap more rewards short term rather than doing a tutorial marathon! I will probably find myself revisiting these lessons!
I did hit a major milestone in my learning though. I successfully accessed the advice generator API, consumed the data and output it in a neat front end component. Here's my attempt at the challenge.
Thanks to the maker of the API (which doesn't require authentication) and Frontend Mentor who setup the challenge. I remember just starting out, APIs were a novel concept and I was worried at the time, that it was too complex a subject for me to grasp. My personal projects were all static and I felt if I wanted to make any real proven advances in my technical knowledge, I would need to showcase how I can render dynamic data into an application. The journey to get to this point was still arduous, I did a lot of study on the subject (reading web articles, speaking to colleagues, CodeCademy) and I still think I am at the tip of the iceberg, but it is rewarding to put knowledge to code and return what you were expecting. The process has encouraged me to seek out more challenges to further my understanding and create more interactive, data-rich applications!