Week 2 at LEARN Academy

 

Week 2 at LEARN – What a week.

We dove head first into JavaScript this week and by the end my dreams were filled with declaring variables and writing functions.

I thought I was well prepared going into this week, as I have been learning and practicing JavaScript for about 4 months  now. The good news is that with all of that practice, I’ve gotten pretty good at catching punctuation errors. The bad news is I still need to work on the KISS principle and keeping things simple. I tend to make things much more complicated than they need to be.

What I am really enjoying about LEARN is that our projects continually build upon each other. We were able to take all of the JavaScript code we wrote during the week and combine it with the HTML/CSS skills from last week to learn about the DOM.  At week’s end, I had built four more web pages as well as several JavaScript exercises that I have pushed up to GitHub.

I know we have a good foundation of JavaScript basics, and with each of my partners this week there were times our approach was to “just throw the spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks.” Sometimes things worked and we didn’t know why, and when things were broken we could de-construct to see what was broken. The more we broke things and fixed them, the clearer things became.

Before going into this week, I felt loops and some functions were just like light bulbs. I know if I flip a switch, the room will light up. I have no idea how the light bulb works, but it does work and I can rely on the result when I flip the switch. After this week, I’m beginning to understand how things work. I understand what is happening in a loop, and it’s becoming more clear on which loop to try in a given situation. Also, that pesky return. Should things go inside a certain set of curly braces or outside.

I have been able to pair program with all but two of my cohorts, and hopefully I will be paired up with them next week. I’ve really enjoyed everyone in my cohort at LEARN. We all have different backgrounds but we all have the passion of learning to code in common. I think we have a really fun group. My favorite part of each day is at then end when we share our code. It is amazing to see all of our different approaches to the same tasks, and I am learning from them and gaining new perspectives.

My number one takeaway from the week was to COMMENT YOUR CODE!

Lunch this week was:
Monday – Berkeley Pizza – deep dish slices.
Tuesday – Fatboy’s for a quick BLTA sandwich.
Wednesday – didn’t go out
Thursday – Saguaro’s for a chili relleno burrito, delicious.
Friday – Swamis for a sit-down lunch. Yummy tuna avocado croissant sandwich.

Up next – jQuery and building a Battleship game.