While I have definitely been getting a bit stir crazy during this stay-at-home order (you can only go on so many walks around the same neighborhood), I have used this time to try to learn a lot more skills. I have started some projects and found some great resources for learning.
The first one I will highlight is Pluralsight. Pluralsight has made all of their content available for free (you don’t even need to enter credit card information) for the month of April. I have never used the Pluralsight platform until now, but the few courses I have loaded and worked on have been really great. They have over 7,000 video courses on a wide-range of topics. I decided that I am going to try to use it initially to expand my skills with Python, WordPress, and Angular. More on how you can get access here.
The other resource I found out about is Udemy, and access to it actually comes from my local library! Denver Public Library gives you access to Udemy for Business for free and anybody who is a resident of Colorado can sign up for a Denver Public Library card. I have used Udemy previously and I will say that content can be a little hit or miss. There is a lot of really good content on Udemy and I used it as a primary resource to achieve two AWS certifications, but there are also some courses that seem a little thrown together. If you are a Colorado resident you can find more here.
The first project I started is an application to help me track Contacts, Companies, and Applications for my job search. It’s bigger purpose though is to help me grow my skills with GraphQL which I wrote about in my last blog post. This project has been a lot of fun and has introduced me to a lot of new tools. The new things I am working with on the backend are graphql-yoga, graphql-tag, and prisma. Also, while I have worked with bcrypt and jsonwebtoken before, this is the first time I am working with it in JavaScript. The new things that I am working with on the frontend are graphql and apollo. The frontend has been a little more complex than I was expecting, but that has made it more fun to work on!
The other project that I started is a sample WordPress site to work on my design skills, because that is an area where I have very little experience. I just created a container on my local machine and I have started laying out a sample shopping site that sells fake items. I set aside a couple of courses on Pluralsight to hopefully help me learn all of the ins and outs of WordPress and work on some good design principles.
It is a weird time right now and there are going to be a lot tough times for many. As for myself, I know that the job hunt is probably going to get a lot tougher. The good news is that there is a lot of time for learning and sharpening your skills, and there are a bunch of resources out there to help right now.
Resources:
Udemy
Job Board Project: