Bilingual but not quite
Continuing onwards with the web development from last week, emerge Javascript. For many on the cohort and me included, Ruby has been the only programming language we were familiar with, so to throw all that out the window and pickup Javascript in a week was a tall order.
The first few days we were tentatively picking up bits of Javascript and comparing against the simplicity of Ruby and having a good old moan about why everything just seems so messy in JS. Brackets upon more brackets and semi colons caused chaos initially, we are so lucky to be coding at a time when VS Code has so many plugins and code snippets available to make writing Javascript just that little bit less taxing. Me and my pair partner spent a good 10 minutes this week trying to hunt around for missing brackets that was stopping our code from running, an experience I never want to repeat even though we can see the funny side of it now.
Monday and Tuesday consisted of going over some past problems and programs we had solved using Ruby and converting them into the Javascript equivalent. This process wasn’t quite as difficult as anticipated due to the fact the Jasmine testing suite which is what we were using for Javascript was quite similar to Rspec. Even so the progress we were making felt very slow and I started feeling impatient to start on the weekly challenge this week which was to produce a functional thermostat complete with user interface. In hindsight spending the time to really get to grips with test driven development for javascript really helped me feel more comfortable writing tests in Jasmine in preparation for the Thermostat challenge.
We also practiced debugging in Javascript and learning more in general how websites load and handle information. It was all very interesting and certainly good knowledge to gain in order to produce websites using Javascript which aren’t slow to load. Nobody has the time and patience for that nowadays.
It can be daunting coming from what you are familiar with, jumping into a language you have no knowledge of. The more I go on this journey of coding the more I realise it really isn’t about how much syntax you know but rather your understanding of concepts and how the syntax you require allows you fulfil your objectives. The biggest steps I feel I have made as a developer is building programs from scratch, I’m not going to lie, I still feel apprehensive towards starting something afresh with little guidance but I’m getting there and by the time this course ends I will hopefully have this mastered along with many other skills.
To begin our thermostat challenge we started by writing our tests in Jasmine and the logic required to pass them, next we combined our limited html and css knowledge in order to facilitate a semi non terrible looking interface. I felt a little guilty in the sense I spent way too long trying to make the page look good. Instead of spending the evenings looking after my wellbeing and relaxing I was spending my time looking over css pages and seeing how to change trivial things such as button colours. Really need to know when to stop!
We also spent a small amount of time with JQuery adding some more functionality to the webpage which was also extremely fun, however managed to control myself on that one. Connecting the javascript by loading the scripts into the html also wasn’t as hard as I imagined it to be, which I am extremely thankful for as towards the end of the week everybody was feeling lethargic after another long week at Makers.
