Love/Hate with Abstraction
Listening to a podcast about JavaScript this week I heard a great analogy for abstraction. If you thought of it as learning music and had to study music theory for two years before actually jamming out to anything how many would make it through? On that note, pun intended, if you learned a few power cords, and that was it, you could play almost any song pretty well.
But, is “pretty well” good enough for something we are passionate about?
This week we delved into Node.js which is an amazing framework that allows JavaScript to be written on the server-side. The challenge for me is learning how to use it while magic happens behind the scene due to abstraction. Abstraction is the layers of data that hide the complexity creating simpler coding.
At first I was referring to everything in Mozilla for a complete insight. I soon learned the best method for myself with this abstraction is to go through and do the code and then to reverse engineer it. Not only does this give me the satisfaction of jamming out to my music before two years, but it allows me to understand how the smaller parts are interacting when dissecting them in the documentation.
There is a struggle between the immediate gratification and delayed gratification that mix and can allow for a best of both worlds scenario if you allow it.
See what you can do with Node.js like this Twitter Bot that generates tweets based on hash tag you provide it!
As if Node.js isn’t enough I decided to switch to Dvorak keyboard this week. If you are unfamiliar it is a more efficient layout of the keys that allow a lot less strain on your fingers and type faster. An interesting fact I learned about the Qwerty (normal) layout was it was designed to limit the key hammers from hitting each other on the first typewriters. Not too relevant for today!
After one week of Dvorak I can tell how it is in fact better but the learning curve is steep as it has taken me a good thirty minutes to type this short content. To learn more about Dvorak.
— Brad
