It's been a more productive week as team, as we have been getting stuck in to the tickets that have fallen down the priority list. A lot of them were blocked for one technical reason or another, others were just put on hold so it was satisfying to finally take these features into code review or push them into develop branch. It has been a while since I have gone through the whole process of feature development for our code base and I certainly was slow off the mark, after not having gone through the cycle for a few months. Fortunately, we have several sources of 'how-to docs' thanks to software like Miro Boards and Notion note-taking apps.

We had a catchup with a content team on a project which is dragging its heels. I've taken it as far as I can- funnily enough I say that, but some strange sense of perseverance forces me to iterate or push my boundaries of what I have produced and then make it better. I remember saying this when I made the proof of concept, with the excuse that the feature works in a protected sandbox environment. But I managed to put the code into our codebase and patch it together which I didn't think I could do on my own. Sometimes a lack of senior support can be a silver lining: you can unblock yourself and resolve your problems, you just need more time. Accept it, and own it.

Regarding continued development, I finished a free short online course on UX/UI fundamentals for web design (hosted on the gymnasium) which is part of a general knowledge build for our work, with the end goal of redesigning our site. I thoroughly recommend it if you are new to web and UI design. I thought I had a good handle on this stuff (I did a basic module in CodeCademy) but alas, I have knowledge of the tip of the iceberg!

I'm pursuing my studies in React.js and although I have been back and forth with it (between React syntax and plain JS), this time round I'm slowly recalling this information from both language and library more. A big help was revising, consolidating and restructuring my notes on React which was cobbled together originally from learning on the docs, online platforms like CodeCademy and Scrimba. Actually spending time reorganising this, putting the code snippets into a sandbox to see if it works was so important to building the muscle memory and appreciation of the library. One big misunderstanding I had was that I wasn't aware that there were two ways of writing components because I wasn't privy to the history. As such, my notes were incorrect and required rewriting. Now, it's starting to make more sense but I have a long way to go!