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Simon Stranks
Simon Stranks

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Week 6-13 - Summary

What a long JavaScript journey!

I purchased a complete JS course through Udemy and have spent the past several weeks working my way through the entire 60+ hour course; completing the challenges, the projects, and importantly making quality notes for reference so the knowledge isn’t lost! I also found a website called ‘Codecademy’ and worked through their tutorial section too, which was also useful.

It was a bit of a slog trying to complete the entire Udemy JS course, but I felt it necessary in order to get a thorough understanding of JS and to have a solid book of notes for reference. The course covered all the fundamentals, some really useful ‘under the hood’ theory on how JS works, and all the way up to the more advanced topics like closure and asynchronous functions.

Reflecting on my JS journey, I admittedly felt a bit intimidated by the language before I began learning. It is a central language of the internet after all! Now I feel it has been demystified and I feel a lot more confident in my ability to expand my learning going forward. I do quite like the style of the language itself, the syntax and features, but then that’s not really surprising given my first language was VBA inside Excel and AutoCAD!

I’m going to have a well-deserved break and start fresh next week, having noticed my energy has been decreasing and fatigue setting in (not helped by the abysmal weather and pandemic). I think I will jump back into the ‘FrontEndMentor’ coding challenges next week and move to the more difficult scenarios, so I can apply my JS knowledge practically. I will look for some other JS challenges or practical applications, as well as start planning a personal project to demonstrate my frontend skills – I had an idea to re-create a book of solo card games that I own.

Thinking ahead, I already have a course and some resources on Python lined up. From my research Python seems to be the next language to delve into, for both its wide scope of application and also for the backend potential use – I think it’s prudent to dive into backend development too, to get a good all round knowledge base. Perhaps when I’ve spent more time practicing my JS skills I may come back and look at Node.JS, algorithms, and more advanced concepts.

A few weeks back, before I became immersed in the Udemy JS course, I completed the lecture and exercises for CS50 Week 2 which involved more programming in the C language. From memory I think it took the better part of two days to complete the exercises – always opting for the more challenging ones! Now that the JS course is done I want to resume my aim to complete a CS50 module a week, to keep the momentum going and also keep my learning diversified!

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