What are you learning?

#javascript #beginners #computerscience #discuss

I thought it might be fun to discuss what I'm focused on learning for the month of November. When I first graduated from Flatiron, I made a post-bootcamp curriculum of things to learn over the following months. But since then, I've found myself slowly drifting away from that laundry list. This is partly because of feedback from other developers, along with my struggle retaining and applying certain topics.

So my priorities have shifted to learning JavaScript well.

Since my program focused on teaching a little of everything (rather than going deep in any one thing), there's still a lot to do before I can feel confident with JavaScript. That's why it's the perfect time to recalibrate my initial curriculum (IC) for the next few months.

In November, the IC has me scheduled to:

wrap up learning Express
create a React Admin Panel
start a project using the MERN stack
among other things

Current status:

I'm still learning fundamental computer science principles
I'm still building a strong foundation in vanilla JavaScript
I'm still exploring express

Goals for the next 3 months:

Work on challenging projects (rather than tutorials)
Deploy my projects and maintain them
Start testing in every project

These are more general goals. So the next step will be to break them down into measurable steps to track week to week.

Realizing that knowing a bit of everything wasn't getting me very far, I quickly decided to focus on JavaScript, because I liked the language. Check out this great video by Fireship on how JavaScript works under the hood.

Top comments (14)

maxdevjs • Nov 13 '19

Note: this is more about the how than the what.

My goal until the end of the year is to build (as a side effect) a stronger foundation in vanilla JavaScript (especially "data management").

At times, it can be a pretty boring duty, for this reason I chose creative/generative coding (an activity really appealing to me) as booster. I currently put on hold things like frameworks and web stuff.

At the end, I am focused in learning how I learn the best, case to case, in a sustainable, healthier possible way, in being more flexible:

started to schedule weekly/daily the relevant topics
adopted an iterative method
created a not too rigid routine

I often take a code in some other language to be translated, iteratively "improving" it and when possible, learning how original features could be translated too (ex. Python zip, range functions to ES).

Work in progress...

Jasterix • Nov 18 '19

What does your week/day look like? I'm trying to find a rhythm that works in terms of being pacing and retention

maxdevjs • Nov 18 '19

At the moment, it looks a mess. Isn't intentional, I have a few other activities filling the time in random periods. But, to be fair, it feels good to alternate having more or less time to study. When I do not have time to get "saturated", retention is boosted. That being said, I actually prefer to have a not too rigid routine.

Something that I started doing in the last week and works well for me, is also to alternate topics (or same topic, different points of view/paradigm/language/platform/etc) and come back after a few hours/days to the previous. Probably not the most time effective method!

Again, it is Work in progress... :)

Christopher Kruse • Nov 13 '19

I just spent the evening diving into Kubernetes. Trying to get a service spun up (using MySQL as an example - brings in interesting problems like "how do I manage user/password combos" and "how do I not lose data when it stops?").

Next up is to play around with Terraform, so I can compare that with CloudFormation as a method for defining Infra as Code.

Ryan Smith • Nov 18 '19

I'm learning some design and finishing my design for a personal website. I'll also be learning more about Stencil as I get further into implementing it. No concrete goal, just a fun project to work on.