Two weeks into Code Bootcamp. What have I learned?
The short answer is… a lot! However, I’m guessing you’d like me to elaborate. So here it goes.
The coding bootcamp I chose to attend is called the Suncoast Developers Guild Academy. There was some pre-work for me to work on leading up to the program; the purpose here being to introduce myself to basic web development concepts and languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There were also some links to review C# and .Net and Ruby on Rails but I didn’t have enough to time review those very thoroughly. Every day after work I pulled up the pre-work links and starting learning as much as I could on my own about HTML and CSS. Things were going good. I was starting to get it and could even build my own basic, static websites. Even JavaScript seemed to go well (at the time I thought it was going well anyways). I could define variables and learned how to write a function. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I could do it.
Enter Coding Bootcamp. The first two days went really well. We started with basic HTML and CSS. I had already seen some of these concepts and knew how to use them. But then we started learning more complex CSS like using flexbox. I did not come across flexbox in any online code tutorials or youtube, even though I now know it is used very often because display: flex; is a game changer! Now I flex many elements on a page in my designs. You can see my first project using flexbox here http://articles-benjaminjehl.surge.sh/. Flexbox makes it easier to align content and items on a page in a nice and neat way. As well as also making your page dynamic and showing more or less content on a page depending on the size of the browser window.
As we start week three, we are diving deeper into the world of JavaScript. This language so far as been tricky and learning has been difficult, and at times quite frustrating. There is some light at the end of the tunnel however. For each day we continue to learn more about JavaScript, the more the language is making sense and I find I’m spending much less time completely confused. Which is nice. Speaking of forEach, after an entire weekend of struggling to implement this concept into my Blackjack project (which you can see here- http://blackjack-benjaminjehl.surge.sh/), I was finally able to implement this code and most importantly, keep my game working. forEach looks at an array that you direct it to, and will look inside to gather the information contained within the array. It will continually loop around the array until it ends. To find the value of the cards in the player’s hand my code looks like this:
Since I will be using this hand total value several times to compare against the dealer in order to determine who wins a given hand, I put the calculation inside of a function that can be called upon when needed. Inside the function we are setting the player’s total to 0. Then we are telling the computer to look at the variable I set for the player’s hand, look at each card inside that hand, add the value of the card to the player’s total (which started at 0), then give me that value. With this function I can dynamically display the player’s total on the webpage and compare the player’s total and dealer’s total to determine who wins each hand.
When we first started JavaScript, I could not have imagined that just a week later I would be able to understand this complex logic and implement it in a website that I created. Without the teachings and guidance of my instructor Gavin, this would have taken much longer; especially if I was attempting to learn this on my own. The way we are taught to write JavaScript in class is the modern way being used today, whereas many examples one can find online are old and no longer the accepted way modern JavaScript programmers write code. This experience continues to cause some confusion and frustration. But when your code works, it’s an amazing feeling that trumps the struggles leading up to it! Each day I find myself excited to find out what I’m going to learn that day and continue to ‘level up’.
