Javascript is my third language that I’ve learned, with Java and C being the other two. The freeCodeCamp website helped a lot in expediting the process and gave me a pretty solid grip on the core concepts of javascript. Of course, I also decided to finish my tasks at the last possible minute so imagine hamming out 70 lessons in 4 hours just to get a few hours of sleep for the night. This taught me the valuable lesson of why waiting until the last minute is bad… I say as I start working on this essay a few hours before it’s due. But we don’t worry about those minor details. It will only be a matter of time before the athletic programming style kicks this habit out of me! Hopefully.
Focusing back onto the freeCodeCamp, one of the most important lessons I learned is to make our variables using var! I hope that was taken as a joke and not literally because we then learned to never use var or at least avoid using it because we have superior variables like lets and const. Jokes aside, it’s pretty neat that we can just use one variable type thing to make a variable rather than having to define our variables with a specific type. For example, we can just use let to make a string, int, or whatever whereas in Java we need to specfically define them as their types. That’s pretty cool. We can also return multiple types in our functions which is also pretty amazing and makes things much more efficient. All in all, javascript seems to be a langauge with a lot of wiggle room to write code in a greater variety than the other languages that I know which gives a lot more freedom when it comes to development and makes for a great software development language.
With the right tools for the job, we also need a job to use these tools for. When it comes to the WODs, they offer a great way of utilizing our tools. The WOD and the practice WOD that we received so far weren’t the most stressful and were in fact kind of fun to be given something to code in a short amount of time. This forced us to think on our feet, or perhaps our hands in this case, and receive the problem, envision a solution, and then code it out. I’m sure that the level of stress will rise by a lot as the semester progresses but for the time being, I think the quick thinking, high pressure problem solving will develop excellent skills that can be applied in our future.