Level Up Your JavaScript Game!
A fellow developer recently expressed a sentiment I’ve heard and felt many times myself.
“There are a lot of JavaScript concepts I know, but I don’t think I could code them live in front of you right now.”
It’s one thing to understand the concept of a Promise or destructuring in JavaScript, but it’s quite another to be able to pull the code out of your shiver without a web search or a copy/paste.
There are so many concepts like this for me as a developer. They’re my gaps - the pieces I know are missing. I know they won’t take long to fill, but it’s just a matter of finding and making the time. My strategy is to…
Record them
As I become aware of these gaps, I write them on my task list. I may not get to them right away, and that’s fine. When I have a spare hour though, I turn to these items in my task list and then off I go, learning something new.Write into permanent memory storage
Computers can save things permanently with a single write. For me, it takes 4 or 5 writes. For example, a long time ago, I wanted to learn how to write a super basic web server in Node.js - from memory. So I looked it up and found something like this…var html = require('http');
html.createServer((req,res) => {
res.end('hi')
}).listen(3000)I found it, tried to memorize it, tried to write it from memory, failed, looked it up, and tried again as many times as it took until I could. Now I have it. I can whip it up in a hurry if I’m trying to show basic Node concepts to someone.
In counseling my friend on what JavaScript concepts would be beneficial to practice, I decided to compose this rollup blog post called Level Up Your JavaScript Game! to share more broadly.
There are 5 things I recommend you not only grok generally, but know deeply and can whip up on request…