Hello everyone!

My intent with this blog isn't to build a huge following or become a famous content creator. The purpose of this blog is just to track my learning, and maybe be a place for me to come back to later on to see how far I've come. If someone else learns from my struggles, all the better!

I'm currently doing 100 Days of Swift , and today was day 24.

"A large part of our work as iOS developers is always going to involve the fundamentals of app development: receiving some data, formatting in a specific way, and making it look good on-screen." - @twostraws

For me, a lot of today was review because in addition to Paul's incredible curriculum, I had also been building an app on the side as a personal project. My side app is a utility that takes information from the user's Paprika shopping list and adds it to a Kroger grocery cart to aid in placing curbside or delivery order. In the process of making that app, I did quite a bit of work with JSON parsing and Codable.

JSON in a lot of ways feels like home for me, because JavaScript is the first programming language I ever felt comfortable with. This naturally led me down a path that included things like NodeJS and JSON. My favorite JavaScript app I've made is a skill for Amazon Alexa that looks up cards from Magic: The Gathering and reads the stats and/or current TCGPlayer prices, depending on what the user asks. This app relies heavily on the Scryfall and TCGPlayer APIs.

Prior to JavaScript, I had dabbled in quite a few languages, but never got particularly proficient with any. Most of my prior experience has been looking at existing things that do things similar to what I want to do, then modifying them into an app that does what I want. Over my lifetime, I have dabbled with LOGO, COBOL, C/C++, PHP, LUA, Python, and XML.

In addition to JavaScript, the only relevant skills I have are HTML4 and CSS2. The astute among you may have noticed these are old versions -- that's correct! I'm currently working on a website to brush up on these skills to make use of new added methods, stop using deprecated tags, etc. My focus at the moment is Swift.. but as with many people, making websites was a huge part of my childhood. I'll never stop making websites, even if professional web dev isn't my end goal.

So anyway, that kind of went all over the place. Hello everyone, my name is Spazure and I'm finally working towards achieving my dream of being a real programmer some day. I'm starting at this a lot later in life than most students, but I'm confident that I'll be just as useful as any of the youngin's soon enough! I've got 2 years of college behind me, and I'm heading back to school in the Spring. Not to just sit and spin my wheels in the meantime, I'm starting with Swift, then moving onto updating HTML and CSS, then ultimately planning on taking a deep dive into React. Fun times are ahead!

-Spazure