It’s been just a bit over a year since I started answering questions on Stack Overflow. I stuck with answering [react-native] questions almost exclusively because I wanted to hone my expertise in that niche. It worked, but it also opened my eyes to some larger problems with both the Stack Overflow and React Native communities.

Devlog for day 20 or whatever day I’m at of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

I had my first pull request merged recently! 🎉

It was exciting, and I learned a lot along the way. For those of you looking to get involved in open source, this post is my attempt at helping you take that first step by retracing my journey.

First in a new series of posts that I’ll be calling Code Dive. I like testing the depth of my React Native knowledge by answering questions on StackOverflow. Occasionally, I’ll run into a question that asks about the same exact issue I ran into and was forced to look into the source code to understand. So I take the time to redo the code dive and write out a summary/explanation of what I discovered. For any that I feel were particularly useful, I’ll be reposting them here.

For my very first report, I’ll be explaining why headers and footers are not included in the columns for React Native’s FlatList component when using the numColumns prop. Originally asked here.

I’ve forked and made minor pull requests in the past, but this past week (a full 3 days of analyzing/coding & 1 day of documentation), I made my first real fork of an existing project. It was quite the task as I had to learn the ins and outs of the existing codebase in order to make the large changes I wanted. Today, I’ll be talking about my entire thought process as I forked google-maps-services-js into react-native-google-maps-services.

Devlog for day 19 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

Devlog for day 18 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

Devlog for day 17 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

Devlog for day 16 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

Now that I’m blogging regularly, I figure that doing a yearly type post would be a great way to summarize my feelings and then later see how they change. So I plan to write a Tech Prediction article in January of every year and a Tech Reflection article in December of every year. It’ll be a fun way to see how right or how very very wrong I can be.

Standard Disclaimer: Don’t take anything I write here as fact. I am far from an expert in anything and these are just my personal opinions.

Devlog for day 15 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

Devlog for day 14 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

tl;dr: My resume in HTML + WYSIWYP (what you see is what you print).

Devlog for day 13 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

First devlog of the new year! Hello 2018!

Even though #Devember is over, I plan to continue writing devlogs as I found that even on a broken schedule, it helped to keep my mind organized and forced me to make notes that were more coherent than what I keep in my Zim Wiki. With that said, onward to trying to get to 100 Days of (non-consecutive) coding.

Devlog for day 12 of my #100DaysOfCode coding challenge.

If you’ve recently tried to boot into a new Linux distribution install using EasyBCD (so you can multi-boot with Windows), but failed and landed at a grub> prompt, then this post is for you my friend.

Devlog for day 11 of my #100DaysOfCode and #Devember coding challenge.

Devlog for Days 7 to 10 of my #100DaysOfCode and #Devember coding challenge.

Devlog for Day 6 of my #100DaysOfCode and #Devember coding challenge.

Official update for Day 5 of my #100DaysOfCode and #Devember coding challenge.

Devlog for Days 3 & 4 of my #100DaysOfCode and #Devember coding challenge.

Patreon sent out an email about their new fee system which abandons the pooled payments they were doing before. Due to the negative backlash from both creators and patrons, they updated their blog post with more details explaining why they chose to do this. I’ve read through it, read through Hank Green’s Tweets explaining the situation as well to try and get a hold of the situation and…

Devlog for Day 2 of my #100DaysOfCode and #Devember coding challenge.

Official update for Day 1 of my #100DaysOfCode and #Devember coding challenge.

In my previous post, I hammered out a plan to follow every day. A crucial part of that plan is having a syllabus to follow. One that will refresh my CS knowledge and prepare me for interviews. I’ve been researching this for quite a while now and have finally decided on a plan to follow. Before I get to my own plan, I’ll talk about a lot of the information I read through to formulate my own syllabus.

Coding Challenges are fun ways to practice programming and can help you explore new concepts. Since I’m trying to retrain myself to be employable as a software engineer, I figure that picking up a coding challenge would be a good way to prepare myself mentally for Fizz Buzz style tests in interviews. It would also make the process of going through my own computer science syllabus far less monotonous. So, the obvious question that follows is, which one should I attempt?

The standard way to start all new blogs (for programmers).