For various reasons, I have not managed to make weekly reports since my last post. I had to take an impromptu break for my studies, but have managed to get myself back on track now...
In this post, I just want to focus on some of the main things I have done/learnt since my last blog post (a whopping five weeks back) and to give the posts a bit more structure, I am going to divide them into the following sections:
Things I've worked on/completed since my last post...
Things that went well...
Things didn't go quite so well...
Things I've learnt/things I need to improve on...
Things I've worked on/completed since my last post...
- Debugging
- Rock, Paper, Scissors project (console-based)
- Rock, Paper, Scissors revisited (updated to include UI)
- Etch-a-sketch project
Things that went well...
I think that my general approach to both projects was okay, in that I was not completely stumped in terms of how to approach each of them, though I did of course run into problems with both along the way. I also enjoyed getting to grips with and getting some real experience of DOM-manipulation.
Things didn't go quite so well...
I ran into scoping issues on both projects. Although I think I understood the problems themselves, I think that my haphazard approach (no prior planning) caused me to run into the same problem more than once. I started both projects directly in VS and realised that I was focusing more on just getting the project done, rather than on how to plan in such a way as to potentially avoid certain problems along the way (such as scope errors).
When I did run into problems, I was trying to use the debugger to help me solve the issues I was having. I struggled with this, in spite of having covered the study material in the Odin Project. Often, I did not know where to look or how to see what was actually happening when I had breakpoints set up etc.
I watched a few short You Tube tutorials, but I did not feel that my understanding had increased that much. What did help was sending the issue I was having to someone on the Discord who was able to direct me to what I should be looking at and for in the debugger, although I really need a lot more practice with this.
I also completely forgot to make regular git commits as I was more focused on just getting my code to work.
Things I've learnt/things I need to improve on...
My DOM-manipulation skills have definitely improved as I had very little experience with this before.
In addition, I learnt to be careful to not confuse referencing functions with function calls (myFunction v myFunction() ), I made this mistake more than once, which caused issues.
I also realised that I need to be more mindful of how I can use functions efficiently to avoid repeating code (this is partially due to not planning the code to some degree in advance also though). Due to the issues I faced due to a lack of planning (thinking I would finish the project faster just putting code into the editor), I plan to write pseudocode for my next project, before starting to code it.
Finally, I really need to address my debugging skills, as I think I could solve more of my own problems more easily if my debugging skills were better. I may watch a few more tutorials on this topic and will try to understand more of what is going on in the debugger in future projects.
The week ahead
I just started the 'Objects' section in the Odin Project today and then I will be moving onto the Calculator project, which is the last project in the Foundations section and I am looking forward to doing that project, which I will pseudocode first.
I will try to update my blog on a weekly basis on Sundays going forward.
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