My second week at Northcoders, marks the start of a 3 week block where we focus on JavaScript fundamentals.
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What I've learnt this week
A big focus this week was getting used to pair programming, which is something we'll all be getting used to for our time at Northcoders.
JEST
Testing with JEST has been really fun this week! It's been great to change mindset on how I write code to be TDD focused. Using JEST I've been incrementally adding functionality to my code to pass unit-tests each time and make my functions more robust!
At times it has taken a lot of self-control to not go ahead and implement functionality to the code before it's needed! I've found this has been great for two main reasons. One of the reasons has been to not add complexity to a function, and it has also been great to understand how every bit of code works in more depth.
Value vs Reference
Learning the difference between where primitive types are passed by their value, and non-primitives are passed by a reference to that object in memory. This has shed light on a lot of the quirks I encountered early on in learning JS. As well as being meaningful when testing for mutation across my functions
Destructuring Assignment
On the first time of seeing array/object destructring, it seemed like a syntax error! 😂
Seeing square/curly braces on the left-hand side of the assignment operator, was so odd to start with, but oddly made so much sense, especially in the context of exports and requires!
Resources I've found useful this week
State of JS
Whilst not a resource per say, State of JS been increadibly useful to put a little more context to a lot of the techonologies I see mentioned accross Twitter and job specs. Also who doesn't love a good bit of data visuisation 😅🤓
JEST docs
When getting familiar with testing and what certain assertions actually test for, the JEST docs have come in handy to solidify the points that the tutors have been driving home this week!
My partners
Learning from my partners this week has been increadibly valuable. I have definitely felt more comfortable towards the end of this week with working in a pair, screen sharing whilst trying to type, and communicating in both the Driver and Navigator role, but I know there's a lot of improvment and work to do on this very specific skill.
Writing this makes me think of a CodeNewbie podcast from not that long ago, highlighting just how important these soft skills are in dev roles.
Top comments (1)
Great series! Keep it up, I look forward to following along with your journey! 😄