Day 27 — Turnaround. Day 2 in the world of JavaScript — it…
Tags: Problem Solving, Learning, Debugging, Learn To Code, Makersacademy

Day 2 in the world of JavaScript — it is still really hard.

This morning I got up and decided I am going to go back to CodeWars and try a couple of exercises each day to push my knowledge in JavaScript, so I started easy with a couple of level 8’s before my Peer check in.

To complete a level 8 Kata in Ruby probably takes me less than 2 minutes now but I remember the days when it would take Margo and I about 2 hours and even then there was no guarantee of success. I had to force that memory this morning when 30 minutes in, I was frustrated that I was still trying to complete it.

Anyway, I finally got it done and jumped onto the Dream team call. Our conversations sometimes are super code focused and other days stray into the wilderness. Today was a wilderness, mostly about computer games — some I followed and others lost me — but we have decided we are gonna play a group tournament of Street Fighter 2 when we have some time and I will put my button bashing skills of my childhood to the test.

We had another short workshop today on the process of coding with JavaScript and its testing framework Jasmine. Tatsiana chose to tackle a simple CodeWars challenge and by pure luck, chose the one I had spent the morning battling with. Much to my surprise she took the same process to solve as I had — wasn’t so mad at myself now!

From there I spent the rest of the morning digging into more JavaScript learning — definitely trying to fight the overwhelm of where to start, but defining my goal for the session and not straying has definitely helped me get more out of my learning sessions.

I booked in a 1–1 session with Tatsiana to tackle a few bugs in my weekend challenge and had a great conversation with her about the work I have been doing outside the course on tackling fear. It has definitely done a 180 on my mindset and now pumped for every new learning experience rather than freaking out due to not knowing what is going on.

I had my final session on learning about tackling fear with Louis from Success through Soca during lunch and he said something that perfectly illustrates the change in my mindset:

You’re not a failure if it doesn’t work. You are a success because you tried.

As long as I have learnt something from every session it doesn’t matter if I ‘completed’ the work or hit my goals. This thought process was about to be put to the test this afternoon.

Our afternoon challenge was to take our Airport weekend challenge from week 1 and turn that Ruby code into JavaScript code — sounds pretty easy. Hahaha! I was paired with Jack, the final person on my course I have not spoken to and I was excited to finally work together.

We unfortunately hit some turbulence pretty quickly — but both undeterred we spent a good hour and a half working through and around the error messages. It got to a point where we were completely lost for answers and I called in the cavalry — Alex, my Mentor — for some help.

Alex doesn’t like JavaScript much but this ended up being advantageous to our learning. Instead of looking at our code, spotting the problem immediately he had to work through some debugging processes — teaching us along the way — to finally get to the source of the problem.

4 weeks ago if this had been my pairing experience I would have been, upset and hard on myself that I couldn’t complete the work set. Today, Jack and I both agreed what a great session it was and once Alex had left we felt much more confident in continuing our Airport translation.

I am now super excited to take this knowledge into creating programmes from scratch — tomorrow we are building a thermostat!

Software and Soca

Today my soca track comes from a Vincentian legend known as Problem Child. As a big fan of his music, here is one of my favourites Stay Far (which is where my problems can stay!)