The more things I do, the more I realize that consistency is the strongest indicator of whether or not the venture will go well. My best results have been found through committing to a practice and repeatedly progressing forward. The key seems to be relentlessly sticking with whatever the practice is. Sure, I could take a day off, but then I’d be a day further from the destination. There’s no reason to put off for tomorrow what I can accomplish today. In cases where I find myself taking more days off than days with progress, it’s usually a signal that I’m not committed enough to that thing. It’s important to recognize these situations as soon as possible and to either correct them or pivot away from the practice entirely.

This was a solid week for continuing forward with React. I finished the Building Scalable React Apps course on Pluralsight. The course is a fantastic overview on building a HackerNews/Reddit-like link aggregation service. After completing it and several other React tutorials on Pluralsight, I can say that this is my favorite React course on the site.

I also completed another course that merged the worlds of .NET Core and React. The course is called Using ASP.NET Core to Build Single-page Applications. It showed off how easy it is to get started building single page applications with .NET Core. Microsoft has created some ASP.NET Core project templates that come with the front end package of your choice setup out of the box. One note about the templates, they by default use TypeScript so using them is also a good oppurtunity get a taste of that flavor of development. It’d be worth looking into if someone has created similar default projects using Babel. If not, that’d be a project worth creating and open sourcing for the development community.

Finished

Book(s): Siddartha

Pluralsight Course(s): Building Scalable React Apps, Using ASP.NET Core to Build Single-page Applications

Currents

MOOC(s): Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics

PluralSight Course(s): Implementing and Securing an API with ASP.NET Core, Building a RESTful API with ASP.NET Core

Book(s): Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

On the Next…

I’m going to circle back to the Sabermetrics course. This week work was hectic and I didn’t get enough time to focus on the course. Hopefully I’ll learn something that takes my fantasy baseball teams to the next level.

For reading, I’m going to start looking at Kent Beck’s classic Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. Smalltalk may not be a popular language, and I never intend to use it, but supposedly this book contains a ton of gems on how to write better code. Reviewers herald the book as being full of patterns that can be applied to any code base. It sounds like a promising reading experience lies ahead.