The week
In week five we had our first contact with JavaScript, a language for creating interactive web pages, along with HTML for the content and CSS for the style. It has been a very exciting week and very fun. On Monday I realised that my previous knowledge of this language was very basic. It has been very helpful, though, to have spent some time getting familiar with the syntax so that I can feel a bit more confident, even if everything we are doing now is completely new. We started working right away with prototypes, translating a previous exercise from Ruby to JS, and creating a thermostat using jQuery to make the app interactive, and Ajax to get weather information from an external API.
What I learnt
This week I learnt JS as a front-end language, and Jasmine to test our JS code as we did with RSpec to test Ruby. Being flexible and open to changes really helped me to adapt to the challenge of learning a new environment very quickly.
Struggles
I struggled getting my head around a new syntax. I started the week worried that I wouldn’t be able to cope with such a fast switch from Ruby, a back-end language, to JS, a front-end language.
JS week has been the best of the course so far. I could see more clearly how my code works, since we can run it on the browser. Building interactive applications is something I’m really interested in, and now I feel a bit more confident on how to turn user stories into practical and tangible solutions. Let’s keep learning! 🙌🏽