The week has been slower than usual with more friction around work tasks. I've had more blockers in progressing tickets and coupled with jumping around on different tasks has had a negative impact on my concentration. However, I'm not too discouraged by this and I expect to have weeks like these in the future so I guess its about having a strong mindset to persevere and giving myself slack when things don't always work out the way you want them to.
Most of this friction has come from starting tickets, investing time in researching about them and devising a method to tackle them. Only to get a little way down and hit a roadblock, whether I've reached the limit in my understanding on a topic, or I've just bitten off more than I can chew! The result is deferring the work towards my senior colleagues but they of course have their own work and then the original issue gets placed on the to-do list.
In terms of my apprenticeship training, the online learning has been feeling like tutorial-hell recently: one after another video lesson and note taking without much justification of the skills allegedly learned. No mini-projects to show for it either. Although, I know what the fix is for this problem: do more projects!
On a more positive note, I received some praise from a content editor that I helped out the week before so it was nice to know that I helped in some way and sticking my neck out wasn't a wasted effort. I'm enjoying Drupalize.me theme building course for D8 and D9 which is thorough (around 60 separate lessons!). It has combined familiar concepts and introduced a new way of delivering front-end UI as well as a sprinkling of config setup.
I had a catchup with the apprenticeship trainer and we worked out some fortnightly targets to improve on. I chose debugging and testing as I think this will return dividends in my career early on and hopefully enhance my workflow. To achieve this, I will use CodeCademy's front-end engineer career path course (it has a few lessons on testing) to improve my base knowledge and then research generally on what methods are commonly used to debug in css, js and php / Drupal. We have set these 'SMART' targets and I'm pushing myself to deliver some justification of what I have learned in a fortnight. My end goal is to be able to employ basic testing types in our work codebase, failing that some testing in personal projects. I would also like to use some open-source testing software and integrate into our codebase and then make improvements based on the suggestions.
Lots to learn and not enough hours in the day!