It looks like Pluralsight has added a React path. I’ve already worked through a couple of the courses but I’d like to get through each course in the path. It’s important to learn from several different resources, otherwise you might miss out on some things. Once I’ve went through all of the courses, I’ll work through the assessment and see where I could use improvement. Hopefully I’ll be at the expert level soon. The sooner I start building projects with the sooner I’ll get there.

Working with Elixir has been a lot of fun. The Getting Started with Elixir course is a fantastic entry point for the language. The course gives a good introduction to the language’s syntax and its features. The meat of the course is a cool little exercise where you build an automated Tweet program. In addition to that application, common Elixir tools like mix and hex are covered. The course also briefly touches on how to write unit tests in the Elixir environment. The automatic process recovery has me excited about building some fault-tolerant, automated systems using Elixir.

I started reading the book Musashi. I’m only a couple of chapters in but the story is strong and it’s really pulled me in. It’s long, almost 1000 pages, so I’ll probably finish it sometime around June. It’s a real page turner though, so I might just burn through it.

Finished

PluralSight Course(s): Getting Started with Elixir

Book(s): Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Travel

Currents

MOOC Course: Mastering the Software Engineering Interview

PluralSight Course(s): Implementing and Securing an API with ASP.NET Core, Building a RESTful API with ASP.NET Core, Getting Started with .NET Core on Mac and Linux, React.js: Getting Started

Book(s): Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

On the Next…

Baseball is starting back up this week. I’m sure that I will binge on Cubs games. In the past, there’s always been some anticipation as to whether or not it’d be the year. Well, the year finally came in 2016 with the Cubs winning the World Series. The Cubs are the toast of baseball and 2017 is going to be a fun season to be a Cubs fan. I wrote up my predictions for the season over on my personal website. Take a look!

I’m going to continue digging into Elixir. I might take a look at Phoenix or just continue to play around with the syntax. The first 20 hours of writing code in a new language is always full of fits. I’m still going through that right now. I will produce a list of possible applications to create using the language.

I will also push forward into both React and .NET Core. Hopefully I’ll finish some of the Pluralsight courses I’ve been working through. In addition to that, I will think up some small projects to do in order to make some small, consistant gains to both skill sets.