Day In The Life of a Front End Engineer in LA | Coffee, Coding, and Gaming

It is Saturday, October 11th. It's about 9 a.m. And it's gonna be yet another chill day in the life. And I am continuing my theme of learning. Still taking a break from the app development, but don't, you know, I'm gonna get back into that. I just need to brush up on more foundational stuff before I'm a little more comfortable working on that without these AI agents and assistants. But hey, it's a Saturday. It's gorgeous out. I got a few things I gotta get done today. I'm gonna run a couple of errands. So, you know, just feel free to come hang out. All that being said though, devs, welcome back to the channel. If you're a dev and if you're new here, I'm Derek. I'm a senior front-end engineer who works in the gaming industry based here in Los Angeles. I make videos on JavaScript, tech, lifestyle, and what it's like working in gaming. So if any of that interests you, consider subscribing. But I'm dressed. I just had some breakfast. So let's just kick the day off. Yes, I know, I know, I still don't have a couch. It is ordered and it should be shipping soon. I feel like I've been saying this for weeks, but I ordered this thing on Labor Day and it's been on back order like forever. But it should be in route soon. That's what customer service told me. And then I'll be good. This place will finally be situated. But hey, let's kick the day off. I'm gonna go get a bougie, just absolutely obnoxious coffee somewhere. Get things started. Run a couple of errands, come back, maybe work through some of the next modules in some of this JavaScript, TypeScript stuff that I've been studying up on. And just have a chill, productive day. So feel free to come hang out. All right, that was a solid little study session covering a lot of the kind of basics. Like I said, most of this stuff has been review, but when you review a lot of the fundamentals that you really haven't thought about for a really long time, you tend to re-encounter things that really are just small but fresh reminders. So that's one of the reasons why I'm starting from the very beginning, because I just want to cover all of the basics, all the way up to back up to the advanced stuff that I'm currently doing. Because like I said, there's a lot of very basic, very fundamental stuff that I've forgotten because I just haven't touched it in forever. So it was a good study sesh. Got through a few modules. I've wrapped it up. I'm gonna head home and grab some lunch. Pretty good. So you might be asking yourself, why is a senior engineer at Activision, AKA Microsoft, learning basics and fundamentals of JavaScript when I have over 10 years experience? And the answer is, because I want to. Okay, I've mentioned this in previous videos and whatnot before, but our tech stack at Activision is very archaic. It's very antiquated. It's very out of date. And it's very just vanilla. We write all of our components and all of our things for the front end in a language called HTL. Not to be confused with HTML. It's HTL, which is a proprietary language that was developed by Adobe. And we build all of our components in Adobe Experience Manager. So it's just a very old system. Nothing modern. It's not a modern stack at all. We don't use any frameworks. We do use frameworks internally for other projects, but I am unfortunately not on any of those projects. So I've fallen out of the loop. So that's why I'm on this little learn in public journey, build in public, because I just really want to brush up on this stuff because I'm super out of touch. I feel super out of touch. Whenever I do look at a modern code base for anything or try to build an app like I'm currently doing, I'm just like, what is this? So that is the reason from just getting a refresh from the very beginning. Hey gang, Editor Derek here. What I actually meant to say here was is that I'm doing all of this to feel more comfortable for picking up a modern tech stack, like React with TypeScript. That's literally it. That's why I'm doing this. Anyway, back to the video. Like I've said a couple of times at this point, a lot of it is review, but still, it just feels good to just brush up on everything. You know what I mean? All right, I'm gonna enjoy this Benihana. It's like, it's like 3 p.m. Trying to figure out what to do. Like, do I want to work on the app? Do I want to continue studying, maybe move on to the next module? I don't know. Or should I just chill? Part of me is like, nah, keep going. Like keep being productive, keep doing something. But it is the afternoon and it's a Saturday and this is typically when I hit my slump. Like me two to four is like, I don't know. I need to like typically go on a reset at that point, go on a walk or something. So I don't know. Hey, listen. Hey gang, in case you missed it in the last one, the platform of choice I'm using to upskill is Codecademy. I'm currently running through their advanced TypeScript course to get a better understanding of the syntactic sugar that it adds to JavaScript. Admittedly, and like previously mentioned, I've definitely fallen out of the loop and this platform has come in absolute clutch for getting a solid refresher on a lot of these concepts. All that being said though, if you're in the market to skill up yourself, I've actually partnered with Codecademy to get you all 50% off of their plus and pro plans, both annually and monthly. If you're interested, simply use code Derek50 at checkout or sign up using the affiliate link down in the description. So big shout outs to Codecademy for reaching out, hooking you all up and helping support the channel. But hey, that's gonna do it for this one, devs. Appreciate y'all if you made it this far into the video. Feel free to like, leave a comment or subscribe to the channel and I will catch you in the next one. Take care.