I recently completed a practice JavaScript coding challenge with this problem: “Return an object containing each letter of a passed in string as a key and its number of occurances as the corresponding value.” For example: the function countLetters("Hello World") should return {H: 1, e: 1, l: 3, o: 2, “ “: 1, W: 1, r: 1, d: 1} because there are 3 occurances of the letter l, 2 of the letter o, and 1 of every other letter in the string.
What started as a general curiosity for coding capabilities, and jealousy for what I saw people create on their computer/website, turned into a full-time studying commitment spanning from June through next week. I can still remember the Bootcamp prework I found on Flatiron’s site as a way to gauge interest/commitment with the program. It started with very basic HTML and CSS terms, then progressed to JavaScript fundamentals and manipulating the DOM a little bit. That’s when I felt hooked and decided I wanted to commit 5+ months to learning more about what software engineering was.
So, with module 4, and the introduction of JavaScript in the curriculum, came this idea of the Single Page Application. This opened up a lot of doors in my ability to program, by giving me tools to create some Twitter-ish, Reddit-ish, and Giphy-ish type sites. Of course, these would all be using fetch() with outside API’s (hence the “-ish” at the end of each of them), but you can imagine the leap from module 3 (for me was a hiking location tracker) to module 4 (for me was a ToDo list tracker.)
This Mod 4 project, a Single Page Application built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that communicates with a Ruby on Rails backend API, has been a tough one for me (as has writing out that drawn out sentence.) To start, I still feel a lot like I’m at the beginning of the learning JavaScript hill. I’ve completed all the lessons, attended all the lectures, and now finished the project, yet I still feel like I know so little JS. That’s okay, I felt that way for a long time while learning Ruby (still do to an extent) and I know it’ll come with more and more practice.
The move from Sinatra to Rails for me was a weird one. On one hand, Rails has so many features and so many ways to make creating your web app simpler. But on the other hand, it still felt like learning a whole new set of ideas (because, it pretty much was.) It turns out that making things much more standard and simpler took me just as much time as learning Sinatra from no prior knowledge. Thankfully, the versatility of Rails makes it a worthwhile grind in the end.