Coding Bootcamp Week 2/13: JavaScript Fundamentals + Brain Soup
Week 1 me: “Huh, this isn’t so bad.” Week 2 me: “I have spoken too soon.”
This week, I found that I was stuck more often and found myself frustrated at times, but my husband has been constantly reminding me that if it was easy, everyone would do it, and if I keep at it, I will achieve my goal of becoming a developer (thanks, supportive husband!)
I get caught up in expecting myself to KNOW all this stuff with ease, but someone in the same cohort (shoutout to Verity!) have reminded me that it is only our 2nd week, and we’re not supposed to be programming geniuses just yet, but we’re on our way!
Nevertheless, I had so much fun during this second week, because JavaScript has gotten even more complicated and I love a good challenge.
What we Learned this Week
After the previous week’s basic concepts, we have moved on to more complicated things (I’m looking at you, higher order functions).
Here’s the summary of what we tackled this week:
- node and Testing with Jest + Mock Functions
- Array Methods 101
- Scope
- Value vs Reference
- Destructuring
- Closure
We have been familiar with node since the Precourse, but we delved into it more by installing Jest ourselves and writing and running our own tests. TDD is still a bit challenging for me, but I’m getting there!
What blew my mind this week were Value vs Reference, Mock Functions, and Closure. I’m definitely spending the next couple of hours reading up on this, but I’m sure I can call on nchelp tomorrow for clarification on this.
nchelp is some sort of a “call a friend(mentor)” that we can do during tasks in between lectures if we need guidance or help. We ping the mentors through the terminal by entering nchelp and answering some questions. We leave our Zoom invite links so they can join in when they’re available.
Upon summoning them, sometimes we have to leave offerings to appease the mentors enough to give us answers or guidance. (For legal purposes this is a joke. They give us guidance without offerings. Such merciful mentors.)
Katas & Sprints
At the beginning of the week, we were given a list of katas to solve in the mornings as a warm-up before our first lectures.
They’re pretty chill. I put on some Lo-Fi playlist and hacked on. Quite therapeutic if I say so myself. I get stuck from time to time, but nothing a little Googling or StackOverflow can’t solve.
In between lectures, we did some sprints which involved solving katas, or fixing tests and making them pass. I thoroughly enjoyed the collaborative aspect of the tasks between lectures, because I can either ask for help from my fellow learners on Slack, from mentors through nchelp, or from my partner during pair programming.
Pair Programming
For this week, days on our calendars were marked so we know which day we are pair programming or going solo.
We had 4 sprints this week: Monday & Tuesday (Paired), Wednesday (Solo), Thursday (Paired), and Friday (Paired).
I wasn’t able to pair program during the first sprint as I had a doctor’s appointment on Monday and didn’t want to hassle anyone for leaving early. But I was able to pair with someone on Thursday, who was also my pair on Friday.
For our Thursday sprint, we had to create functions that work the same as some Lodash functions. For our Friday sprint, we explored higher order functions and basically melted our brains into understanding funception (function within a function within a function within a fu — …).
(Shoutout to my coding pair, Joshua! You’ve been awesome.)
Northcoders Mentors Listen
Sure, we’ve got a fixed schedule on our calendar. But they know when we’d need more time to code, or when we’d need more clarification on a concept or a problem.
They have postponed one lecture to give us more time to code, as well as squeezed in 20 to 30-minute Zoom calls just to guide us to the right path.
In terms of support, we definitely have it 100%, and I couldn’t be more thankful.
Conclusion
Week 2 has been *chef’s kiss*, and I’m looking forward to Week 3.
See ya next week!
Northcoders Bootcamp Series
- Week 1: Back to Basics (Not Really)
- Week 2: JavaScript Fundamentals + Brain Soup ⬅ YOU ARE HERE.
- Week 3: More JavaScript Fundamentals + Recursions and Object-Oriented Programming
- Week 4: Async, Data Fetching, and Promises
- Week 5: First Week on Back-end
- Week 6: Second Week on Back-end
- Week 7: Final Week on Back-end
- Week 8: The DOM and ReactJS + Holiday Break!
- Week 9: New Year, New Tech
- Week 10: Building the Frontend and Why I Found it Hard
