Broker to coder? - week 5

 previous article 'Broker to coder? - the beginning'

The last few weeks have been quite the rollercoaster and as with any course or learning, one minute you think you have cracked it and then along comes a new concept and bam you feel you know nothing.

We spent most of week 3 covering some pretty intense material including ES6/7 functions, variables, arrays, loops, objects, and learnt about the 'array' of array iterators available, .map and .filter are really nifty. At this point, I was also nodding in agreement with how a maths degree isn’t necessary to understand JavaScript (I will now add that it would be really helpful though!)

Week 4 is when the coaches dialled up the intensity, and also got us to apply what we had learned. The mornings were spent delving into object-orientated programming, classes, manipulation of objects, and test-driven development. For the afternoons we were set the challenge of making a game (Project1) by the end of the week, with a checkpoint for an MVP by mid-week. This had us using our new skills under a little pressure. This was a new kind of pressure for me and certainly tested my resilience.

It’s here that I hit a bit of a JavaScript wall, as I now had all the tools in front of me but I was unsure and a bit scared about how to assemble or use them. A little bit of panic set in and as predicted I was sat there at the start of week 4, thinking what have I got myself into? The coaches were really helpful, as it turned out that I was getting 80% of the way there when putting things together, incorrect syntax made up about 15% of the shortfall (this I am assured comes with practice), the other 5% was just not knowing (google is indeed your friend!).

On Friday morning there was a surprise challenge to make a Morse code translator (Morsecode) and we were given 3 hours to make it. Having climbed the mammoth task of building an MVP of a game by mid-week, this appeared to be a logical task to work through. Deciding on how to handle the data and layout the logic was relatively straightforward. Again I was so close, just a '+=' away, as I managed to get it to accept one character and output one code character. So far so good.

For the more curious, I have included links to the projects in brackets above, and here are links to the code (Project1) (Morsecode). Its all still work in progress.

If you are thinking about doing something similar, I am more than happy to share my two-penneth, just drop me a message. I'll be back with another update soon.