Current Rank:
Rank and the Journey Ahead
One of the defining aspects of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is rank. When you walk into a BJJ academy, the belts worn by practitioners immediately give a sense of progression and experience. Unlike many martial arts, BJJ has only five primary belt colors (white, blue, purple, brown, black) with stripes marking progress between them. Earning a belt in BJJ is a blend of time, skill, and consistency, with a black belt often taking around ten years to achieve ⏳.
What makes BJJ unique is its ability to test skills in real time. Every training session includes sparring, which means that every belt represents practical experience under pressure 🥋. While there is variation in skill within a belt rank, generally a person’s belt level reflects their knowledge and effectiveness in rolling.
Rank keeps practitioners engaged. It’s a reflection of effort, discipline, and growth 💪. Starting now, I’ll include my current rank in each blog post as a way to track my progress. At this moment, I consider myself a white belt with three stripes. Based on the typical progression, I expect to spend another three months at this rank before transitioning to blue belt, which usually takes about a year and a half in total. As I progress, I’ll reflect on what I’ve learned at each stage.
Week in Review: Challenges, Progress, and Wins
Website Update: Overcoming a Theme Issue
This week, I posted my first blog on WhiteBeltDev, but I hit a roadblock 🚧. The TailPress theme I’m using didn’t have a clear homepage setup, which caused the homepage to duplicate under itself whenever I posted a blog. The root of the issue? I didn’t fully understand how the theme worked.
To fix this, I copied the content-front.php file, renamed it to page-home.php, and added some necessary code at the top. Then, I created a new Blog page and adjusted my settings in WordPress. After testing with a blog post, everything worked 🎉! This troubleshooting process reinforced one of my favorite aspects of development: learning through problem-solving 🛠️.
FreeCodeCamp Full Stack Course: Laying the Foundation
I started FreeCodeCamp’s Full Stack Developer course this week and have almost completed the HTML section 👨💻. Though tempted to skip parts of it since it’s mostly review, I stuck with it to ensure I build a solid foundation. The course includes labs that allow me to write code every day, which is crucial for retention and practice 📝.
Next week, I’ll wrap up the Accessibility section and move on to the CSS course 🎨.
CS-320: Software Test & QA Automation
In CS-320, I submitted Project One, which involved building a Java application with unit tests to verify customer requirements ✅. The focus was on delivering contact, task, and appointment services that allow for adding, updating, and deleting records within an application.
This project reinforced unit testing principles using JUnit. Thankfully, I didn’t encounter any major issues. Everything worked as expected, which is always a good feeling in software development 🚀.
CS-305: Software Security – Tackling OWASP and Maven
This week’s CS-305 assignment introduced me to the OWASP dependency scanner, a tool that detects security vulnerabilities in a project’s dependencies 🔍. The goal was to analyze the results and configure the project to suppress false positives where necessary, a key DevSecOps practice.
I hit a couple of roadblocks:
- Outdated Spring Boot and Java versions in the assignment’s codebase. Fixed by updating the
pom.xmlfile 🔧. - Missing NVD API key, which caused build failures. Resolved by reading the documentation, requesting a key, and updating
pom.xmlaccordingly 🔑.
Despite the challenges, I felt more comfortable working with Maven and Spring Boot than I did in the past. Progress is happening, one step at a time 💡.
Looking Ahead
Next week, I plan to:
- Finish the HTML and Accessibility sections in FreeCodeCamp and move into CSS 🎨.
- Continue refining my website and potentially tweak the theme further 🖥️.
- Apply the lessons from my CS courses to real-world coding projects 🔥.
- Keep training in BJJ and tracking my rank progression 🥋.
The journey of a software engineer, much like in Jiu-Jitsu, is about constant learning, testing, and refining. Every challenge is an opportunity to improve. Looking forward to sharing more progress next week! 🚀