Things are Brewing

For the last 3 days, I've been working diligently on a brand new course by Colt Steele and Stephen Grider called The New Modern JavaScript Bootcamp. This course is a 42.5 hour behemoth covering a huge swath of topics in JavaScript. For the majority of Friday and Sunday, we were covering concepts I've felt very comfortable with for a while, but now it's starting to get a little interesting. I just finished a section on object-oriented programming, which I believe is one of my weak points in JavaScript. Taking Will Sentance's courses on Frontend Masters really helped me with JavaScript overall, but I believe his object-oriented course wasn't quite as good as the others. Either that, or my level of focus during this course wasn't as good as when I took the others. So, while I feel he really elevated my game when it comes to functional programming and some other key concepts involving the foundations of JavaScript, my object-oriented game did not get elevated to the same level. OOP has been the dominating force in JavaScript for many years, but the landscape is changing and functional programming is becoming the norm. After following this section in Colt and Stephen's course, I don't think I've gained any ground on my knowledge of OOP yet, as this was still a fairly introductory section to OOP, but it was a great refresher of some key concepts. Now, it's on to DOM manipulation.

DOM manipulation, or the document-object-model, refers essentially to the actual browser window that your application resides in. Most of the methods associated with the DOM are not built in to JavaScript itself, but are provided by the browser you choose to use. Of course, Internet Explorer is often way behind everyone else, so some of these methods won't be available on Internet Explorer, but otherwise Chrome and Firefox provide a seemingly endless list of functions you can perform on the DOM. This can include choosing an element from the HTML by its ID and adding a keypress event, such as changing the background color if a button is pressed. I haven't gone too deep on DOM manipulation, but it really opens up a lot of doors of what you can do with JavaScript. Wes Bos' JavaScript30 is a great series for learning more about DOM manipulation. Speaking of which, I still have about 24 days left of that series, and I definitely need to get back into that. That is a really valuable series, and it seems like everyone traveling this path goes through JavaScript30 at some point in their journey. It's on my to-do list, along with about 50 other tasks.

If you're new to my blog, you may not know that about 3 and a half weeks ago, I suffered from a bimalleolar fracture, or in other words, I broke the tip off of my tibia and had a spiral fracture in my fibula. It was pretty rough, but I was really lucky to avoid having to have surgery. In fact, the doctor treating me said he couldn't remember the last time he had seen this type of break where they didn't have to operate. Still, it's been a painful recovery, but within the last week, it's started to feel a lot better. This happened at work, so I was able to receive Workman's Compensation, which covers all my medical bills and about 2/3rds of my wages while I'm out of work. My doctor put me on a "no-work" status up until now, but on Tuesday, barring a bad x-ray, I'll be released back to light working duties. I've already committed to going back to work pretty much at a full capacity, but of course they understand I'll be sitting in a chair with my leg elevated all day. My first day back is Wednesday, and while I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of people at work, I had gotten used to having so much time to spend working on this coding endeavor. My hope was to find a job before I had to go back, but I wasn't able to. That being said, I do have an interview scheduled for Monday and Thursday, as well as one on the 17th of December and another one I should be scheduling at the beginning of this week. The one tomorrow sounds really promising, so I'm sure I'll be posting about that tomorrow. I basically have 2 more days off to get my final grind on before going back to work, so I'll see what I can accomplish in the next 48 hours.

Until tomorrow!