Or lack therof...
Against all odds, I've gotten a couple of hours of studying in tonight. As I detailed yesterday in my entry, my time and energy are being cut short this week due to work being on overdrive. I did the math and, within 6 days, I'm going to end up working around 65 hours. It's no surprise that my attention span is a fraction of what it usually is, but I'm doing the best with what I've got right now. I don't want to miss any important information in the coursework, so any time I feel my attention go elsewhere, I back up the tape and replay it. This has worked up until this point in the night, at 9:45, but given that I'm back at work at 6 AM tomorrow, my night is virtually over. I've achieved my daily goals and then some, so I'm satisfied with my effort.
In the 2 hours I've studied so far today, I was able to wrap up Will Sentance's "JavaScript: The Hard Parts" on Frontend Masters. This course has taken my understanding to a whole new level. Most courses will tell you what the correct pieces of the syntax are and how they fit together in the code, but they don't exactly explain why everything is the way it is and how it actually is. They get caught up in covering as much ground as they possibly can and gloss over the real meaning of certain words or syntactical patterns. Will spent these 7 hours going over seemingly simple functions in a way that I have yet to see. Every line was pored over and explored to the fullest extent, with diagrams to go along. This bridges the gap of knowing what the code is supposed to look like to actually being able to apply the code.
In a way, I'm sad to have finished this course. Will has 3 more courses on Frontend Masters, and I can't wait to take them. It won't be until fairly late in the expert track of the curriculum before I see him again as an instructor, and the other 2 courses aren't actually included in the core curriculum. I don't know if I should take a detour from the curriculum and watch another one of his courses or not, but I think the best thing to do is stay the course. Coming up next, I'm back with Kyle Simpson on "Deep JavaScript Foundations," which I understand is a very challenging course. I trust in this instructor, as well, and am excited to see how well he conveys these concepts. Frontend Masters has not let me down yet; from the beginning, every course has been of an incredibly high quality and I can safely say my knowledge base has grown significantly in the matter of less than 2 weeks. I've gotten through about 50 hours of coursework, putting me on pace for about 100 hours in a month and making it well worth the ticket price. I would highly recommend this to anyone going down the path of learning to become a JavaScript developer.
Until tomorrow!
