I’m so grateful for the work that I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. It has been a wonderful project that has kept me busy every single day of the week except for the weekends. I’ve been putting in 10-hour days on average. Most of it is email support, which I have been considering the best Christmas gift ever. I really enjoy this type of work although I may not always agree with that statement. I recently started diving into Virtual Private Server support and that is also a thrill especially when I’m in the middle of solving a new problem with emails coming from an external service.

I had mentioned before that I was learning React Native so that I could build an Android and iOS app for a church. That project is slowly moving along. I’m still trying to understand the error messages when I compile the code for the apps and also wrap my mind around the best method or constant to use for laying out the screens. Most of the time is spent building the theme and some of the time is spent with passing information between screens or interacting with an API using JavaScript. React Native seems easy to learn the more time I spend with it and also soaking up video tutorials published within the last two years. I learn so much from those videos after watching them over many times and I also learn the mistakes not to make. I keep having to look at JavaScript documentation for a refresher as I’m usually interacting with it only when I need to integrate a Google Maps API into a website that I’m building. I did get as far as pulling in the WordPress website into a screen with webview but that’s as far my local church’s app goes and I don’t want to use that in the final because I think of that as leaving the app unfinished. I built the custom WordPress website for the church that asked me to learn app development that I’ve been dreaming so long about but never had a problem to solve until this project came about. I want to pull in the content of the pages and eliminate the look of the website from within the app by using the WordPress REST API for pages. Then I’ve got to figure out the code for displaying the latest Facebook Live embed so it can be watched from within the app without needing the Facebook app installed. The whole point of this app is convenience and communication with the people in the church. And I’ve searched so much for a good church app tutorial but so far there are none so I have to piece this together, which is fine by me because I like to learn new things with this method.

My mid-2011 iMac was performing slower this past week on 12 GB RAM so I ordered the maximum memory of 32 GB for it. Four cards of 8 GB each from Crucial arrived this morning. I’ve been using Crucial a very long time. I had almost removed the LCD screen when I realized that the RAM bay was accessible just below the monitor. I tediously screwed down the screen using my electronic repair grip pliers and the correct star driver. The grips kept the screws from latching on to the strong magnets or falling through the cracks. I got it all back together then pulled out the old memory, blew out the dust, and seated the new cards. Plugged back in the power, cables, and rebooted. No more sluggish behavior.