A Year Review
Seems like not long ago, I was aching for a company to take a shot at me. Much like ABBA, I was singing the tune, 'take a chance on me". I must have applied to hundreds of companies all throughout the US. Mind you this was also right at the height of Rona. It was in March that I caught a break, Crytica Security reached out and asked if I was interested in a position. I was honest, I did not have the C/c++ skills they wanted, they were honest too. They were a startup and in pre-funding phase. I bit the bullet, still tried to find a paying job but no dice, now I am still with Crytica, I have designed and coded one web app, however much of the value has come in to what I have learned. They set me in a trial by fire sort of scenario, they wanted a front end application that displayed scan data held in a my-sql server. At first the talk was crystal reports and it was my job to connect it and design some reports. This concluded to be a cluster... yeah. We soon found out that it was best if I just coded a web app. So I stuck my head down, learned PHP and had to become more proficient in JS, HTML and CSS. Now, I am proud to say that my product has taken leaps since I first started with version 0.0.0.1. The current version, 0.3.1.1 is better, theres less code, and in my opinion easier to follow. Of course that is subjective, however it is presentable. The webpage is sleek and almost to the point that I wanna call fully responsive. There is still so much work to do, however we are not here to talk about what is left to do, but the journey thus far.
To tie this whole blog into perspective. I designed it with webflow, why? Because at the time I was still not as confident with CSS or Bootstrap, my mind just needed that entry way to a visual representation of the concepts that CSS presented. It was with webflow that I became better acquainted with the box model. it was webflow that gave me the confidence to design my own bootstrap projects. and I think it is webflow that will help me stay up to date with design trends. Never in my life did I consider myself artistic, but with code, I feel as if I know about this 'flow of creativity' the artists talk about. This blog has been my diary, mainly of struggles, I believe I wrote a post about a Black Monday or Friday, where I had three job offers and none of them panned out. I also have posts about my learning JS through projects and toutorial videos on youtube. Yes, all helpful and well look where I am now. I am writing a post about what I have been learning, aka progress!
So enough background. Here is what has been going on, lately as my Reporting sofware grows in complexity (you know the customer wants this feature now), my thinking of structure has also matured. Here's what I think I mean, when I first started coding, I would identify what the customer wanted, ex a textbox that replies with hello world. Easy, I would get to implementing it. Then the customer wanted x, and I would get to that too. Soon, it started to look messy, too much code and no optimization. It was hard for me to read, so I started looking back at my OOP background, pulled the principles of Abstraction and Polymorphism, always keeping Encyption in mind. I also started for ways to optimize my verbose code. This in all led to trying to understand structure. How to better write an algorithm that fills the need of not jut one request or 100, but thousands. So this is the current path I am in, how to improve my JS skills and dipping more into the web frameworks like React.