Designer in NodeJS Master Class
Day #1 and #2
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Pirple in any way. I’ve paid for the course as everybody else. This post is NOT a review of the curriculum or an advertisment.
This series is about my adventure learning JavaScript as a designer.
I was failing at development of my Unicorn skills before partly because courses I picked were too hard, partly because of pure laziness.
Looks like this time won’t be much different. The course is NOT for beginners, but I’m going with it either way (they actually say that it will be a challenge, OMG). Let’s do this!
First, I had to finish a prerequisites test, and guess what, I passed!
Encouraged and teased I watched a brief history of Node.js and was sold immediately.
Ryan Dahl’s story is a mirror image of what we’ve been through with Views. Call it wishful thinking, but the final outcome gave me some perspective and topped me up with motivation. Dahl spent so many years getting all kinds of bad reviews and never stopped believing in his creation. We are still at the beginning of that road with Views, waiting for the community interest to come true.
It’s great to see changing standards and rising communities. I’m ready to fully embrace the existence and importance of Node in all the projects we’ve done up to date using create-react-app
As things started to make sense, other questions arrived:
- What is the difference between a JavaScript engine and a compiler?
- Do high-level processors exist?
I’ve learned about many things; what’s inside the Chrome browser, that Node is like a shell of a car (excluding the engine), V8 is the engine, and I’m a driver, driving on the loop-like road, with options to re-schedule parts of my adventure in time!
It’s cool to know that Node is able to move its own tasks out of the way and perform them asynchronously, without getting stuck at any particular one.
Now it also makes sense what the App.js file is for, and why I need the imports. Essentially, everything is an upside down tree and like an umbrella becomes more complex as it get’s further from the root.
I finally got how to name functions to be able to use them. It couldn’t be easier! I write some functions and call them tools in one file and export it. Then I import that file in another one and call (use, or point at) the function choosing a specific part by writing the name of the part after the name of the function (using dot as a separator).
Here’s a pretty neat list of common conventions for comments I didn’t know about:
At the end of the day two, I’ve got a bit better result from the section quiz.
On to the next chapters.
