Harder than it Sounds

Beyond a short session on Monday to present group projects, we had our final session for Codesmith's CS Prep. We started off the class by going over the problem of the day from Wednesday, and then spent some time going into closure, a really difficult concept in JavaScript that people get wrong constantly. We did this in the typical Codesmith way, by taking one problem and working through it line by line in an interactive way. Everyone got called on to technically communicate at least one line of code in the problem. I was called on fairly early, and was able to manage my way through. I didn't answer it as well as I would have liked, but I did fine. I felt much more comfortable doing this in front of the class than I did on Day 1, which is a huge win for me. I tend to get pretty nervous in larger groups, for whatever reason, so it felt like I worked through that fear throughout these 2 weeks. As always with these Codesmith lessons, I felt like I walked away with a better understanding of the concept being explained. From there, we moved on to the final assessment.

The final assessment covered 3 problems. The first dealt with passing in a callback as an argument to the function. This was something I kind of struggled with before this course, but I felt perfectly comfortable with it in this problem. The second was a great question dealing with returning a function. This was a really complicated question, at first glance, but once I was able to break it down and think about it step by step, it became a breeze. The final question dealt specifically with recursion. Out of everything I learned in these 2 weeks, I've come the furthest with understanding recursion. In fact, recursion was a topic I stayed far away from before this, but now I really see the value of it and would use it all over the place. I don't know how useful it would be in working with React or any other framework, but it's certainly a good tool to have if you want to be a JavaScript developer. After finishing up this assessment, we moved on to the group project. This was much more difficult than I thought it would be, and for all the reasons I didn't think about at all.

Writing the actual code for the project was actually pretty straightforward. At first, we spent about an hour and a half tossing around ideas, which was the first hang-up. We all had different ideas of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to implement it, but we were finally able to land on creating a quiz game. I was more intent on creating this game with HTML and CSS in the DOM, but they thought it would be better to write it so that it outputs to the console. I think it would be a lot more visually appealing to write it in the DOM, but they had a point that the exercise was supposed to be about creating some functionality with JavaScript. I could understand that, so I gave in. Then, we had some real issues with how to implement the actual code. I thought it would make sense to have an array of objects representing the questions with the correct and incorrect answers as key-value pairs, but I got some push-back on this. Then, we had issues on how to write the actual function to iterate through this data. I suggested a switch statement and wrote it out. We came upon some issues when we did this, so I thought about writing a for loop to iterate through them, with a simple if-else statement to go along with it. Another guy in the group thought it would be better to use recursion. Actually, after writing out my code and him writing out his code, his was actually better, so I abandoned my idea. I learned less about writing code and much more about working on a team in this project, which I think is a really valuable skill to attain.

Until tomorrow!