The Fun Stuff

Today marked the last ladies' golf clinic I will, hopefully, ever have to teach. I shouldn't say "have to," since it was actually pretty fun and really profitable. This was the second year we had run the clinic, and this year was 10 times more successful than last year. In last year's clinic, we would have some weeks where only 2 or 3 ladies would show up for the clinic, making it not even worth the time. This year, we have consistently had be 12 and 18 ladies every week, and they have clearly enjoyed the whole thing. I have watched these ladies go from barely being able to play the game at all to becoming addicted and absolutely loving it. They come out and practice on days we don't have the clinic or play with some of the other ladies that also attend. They have purchased quite a few clubs this year, as well, which certainly should make the head professional happy, although he's too narcissistic to realize we have anything to do with that. When we first started the clinic last year, I was nervous to teach in front of a group of people and didn't feel confident in my oratory skills. Now, I revel in the moment and look forward to having the stage for an hour, something I never thought I would be able to say. I've seen this transformation in other areas at the club, as well. We have to do announcements for tournaments sometimes in front of large groups, and I always would get so nervous beforehand, but now, I have no fear at all. I think I've beaten my fear of public speaking, at least to a certain extent. I'm sure if you put me in front of a few hundred people, I would be shaking in my boots.

Yesterday, I finished up my course on GraphQL, leaving me free to focus on JavaScript all the way up until my first day of work. This week, I'll be working on Andrew Mead's The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp on Udemy, which I started a few weeks ago, but moved away from to focus on the GraphQL course. We are still addressing a lot of the basics of JavaScript in this course, but that's ok. After the second half of that GraphQL, I needed a little bit of easing in the difficulty of my studies, at least for a couple of days. I'm sure, as I get further along in the course, the difficulty level is going to ramp up pretty significantly, so for now, I'll take what I can get. I've spoken before about Andrew Mead's teaching style, but I just want to reiterate how good it really is. Instead of just walking you through a project and having you code along with him, he shows a few examples, and then has you do it on your own in a challenge exercise. In the GraphQL course, this became really difficult by the end, and there were actually quite a few I couldn't complete. In this course, so far, I haven't had any issue with them yet, and I've actually tried to challenge myself a little to take it a bit further.

As far as the specifics of what I'm working on, I just finished up the arrays section and have moved on to the section on DOM manipulation, which is always a valuable area in JavaScript, one that I will use often and always need more work refining. In the arrays section, I only had a couple of videos left, one on the .sort() method on arrays, and one that was a challenge video. The way he did the sort method was a little different than I've seen it taught before, but actually cleared up a lot of confusion I had about the method itself. I always just accepted to arguments to the callback, a and b, and subtracted from the other, depending on which way I wanted the elements to be sorted, not really questioning why that happened. In his explanation, he showed how the return value was always, 1, -1, or 0, depending on whether the element was greater than, less than, or equal to the other, and then set it up as an if else statement. This really makes a lot of sense, but certainly isn't the most efficient use of code. In the challenge video, we recreated an object we had used in the prior section to track income versus expenses with a couple of methods on it, and in the video, he instructed us to use forEach to add up the total of all the amounts for each object in an array. I did this, but I immediately thought about using .reduce() to do the same thing. It took me a second to remember exactly how to do so, but I was able to get the code to do the same thing. I was proud of myself for deviating from the instructions and being able to do things a little differently. This is why I love these challenges, and I think this set of challenges in this course are fantastic.

Until tomorrow!