Jan. 17, 2020: What did you learn this week?

I learned that javascript has a built-in keyword "debugger" so that wherever you write that word, the debugger will stop at that point in code (if you have a debugger, such as the Chrome dev tools debugger). This can be useful if your runtime code is uglified, as in this article's cover image, in which case it would be a timely process to find the exact line you want to set a breakpoint on. Instead, a dev can simply do:

function myCodeAintWorkin(arrrrgggh) {
  let thisThing;
  debugger; // <-- runtime will break at this point! (even if this line is buried in the uglified code at line 1112442)
  // Some buggy code here
} 

Finally learned Docker :D
Still testing stuff in the Docker Compose file but yeah, the concept and the Dockerfile are pretty clear to me!!!

I learned about memoization!

Started out researching React hooks, came across useMemo, couldn't make sense of the definition, then finally found this article to explain it.

Optimize the hell out of your Javascript programs with Memoization.

Ola' John Ajiboye ・ Jul 23 '19 ・ 4 min read

#javascript #optimization #performance #memoization

And some day I'll finish reading up on useMemo 😝

I rewrote the entire stack of one of our applications - built with serverless framework - using the AWS CDK. It is AWESOME!!!

Hello! this week has been all about JavaScript Objects and DOM manipulation. Still debating between jQuery or Vanilla JavaScript to play around with the DOM.

I have been playing with Gatsby and Netlify in order to publish my own personal blog.

I learned that Pico-8 is a whole lot of fun! It lets you build retro style games using Lua within a (highly constrained) virtual console.

It has very basic tools built into it for creating animated sprites and sound effects, which at first seem far too simplistic but then become fun as a design exercise in minimalism.

It is also very kid-friendly tool as long as they have someone with some coding experience to guide them. Even kids that can't read yet or write code would enjoy playing with the sound effects and sprite editor while someone else writes the code.

Fair warning, documentation is limited and the API is tiny. But because Pico-8 makes it so easy to explore the source of any games shared in public and ships with a few examples of its own, it has a kind of enjoyable "Learn by copy-paste and see what happens" feel to it.

I read up on how to write unit tests for python via unittest! Also learnt how to get docker images running.

Completely off-topic and weirdly I finally sought out why my keyboard keeps correcting "learned" to "learner" and whether it actually is a word (vs. learnt) after being inspired by this thread while typing out the actual comment 🤣🤣🤣

To call it "learn" is a big word, but I realized that Gatsby is a powerful piece of tech for a number of use cases, and that (as a static site generator) it can largely replicate the features of SSR but in a much simpler way; definitely worthwhile spending some time on it.

I learned how to migrate existing Typescript codebases over to an Nx monorepo. I am really surprised how wonderful this tool is. They have a great video tutorial on how to use it and after exploring lots of monorepo solutions, Lerna/Rush/Etc, this has been the best experience.

I learned how to run a Proxmox hypervisor server on a dedicated Hetzner Root server. To set up everything the way we wanted was quite tricky and I'll be posting about those soon.