Late Start, No Stress

I woke up late this morning and started later than planned. Normally this sort of change in my routine can throw me off for a while, but I found that I was quickly back into flow mode, working through the Gatsby Blog. I managed to solve the routing step of the blog, and decided to move onto CS50 lectures for the rest of the morning.

CS50 was challenging to begin with. The first few weeks of the course require you to program in C. I had never used this language, and it was lower level than Javascript. I quickly found myself struggling with the added complexity and frustrated at what would normally be simple tasks in a language. However, the great part about this hurdle was that it forced me to focus on fundamentals. To really understand what the code was doing - to remove the "magic" layers that we so often hand wave over. I highly recommend that any of you reading this do the same, and even consider taking the course.

Amplifying my skills

Next I decided to explore my old friend and behemoth, AWS. It had been some time since I had started a project with the service, and I felt like brushing up on my skills would be quite useful. I was also hoping to gain a deeper understanding of it all. Previously, I had often felt lost using AWS, managing to work through the challenges right in front of me with very little understanding of the whole setup.

I created a new Amplify project and ran through the major setup process. This led me down the rabbit whole of Amazon IAM, which helped me discover an issue with my account setup. I had made a mistake when setting up the users and their roles, and had unknowingly been using my root account (something that is highly NOT recommended to do when using AWS). I was able to fix this problem.

Late Nights, Good Coffee

Somehow I found myself up to the early hours of the morning coding and working through these problems. I knew that I was onto something in terms of my interest areas when this happened. I had put in countless hours of work and was still driven and energised to learn more. The coffee also helped a little ;).

My thoughts on the day

This was a very rewarding day. I took on some challenging tasks, succeeded on most, and found my passion was strong.