Recent Learning: Tuesday February 6, 2018

Learning Log: Tracking Daily Progress

I’ve done a fairly good job keeping up with my commitment to documenting my daily learning! The workflow I’m using (write Markdown notes in Hugo notebook -> refine and post on main site) has been working well.

I missed an entry for Monday, February 5 but I also found that I didn’t spend as much time reading and going through things. One thing that is nice about this is that it’ll document the ebbs and flows in my daily learning and knowledge gathering/sharing.

I spent a decent bit of time on Monday reading about JavaScript classes. Classes are now included as a JavaScript construct as of ES2015 and are syntactic sugar for objects/prototypical inheritance. I’ve done a bit with classes before but was motivated yesterday to research a bit more because of a decision about whether or not to to teach them in our Creative Programming course. Note: I’ve decided to include them in the course after talking to some friends whose opinion I greatly respect. Also, I do think that it’s worthwhile to teach beginners in a way that’s informed by trends that are sticking. In this case JavaScript developers are adopting classes, especially given the popularity of React.

There are a few other things that have been on my radar as well, which are listed below:

Articles/Blog Posts

Eevee Fuzzy Notepad – Object Models blog post

In a conversation about objects/classes, Marty shared this excellent article with me. This cleared up lots of points for me. The sections on Python and JavaScript are relevant and contain several solid points.

This article contained a link to another solid article about the recent changes in JS:
JavaScript got better while I wasn’t looking

I’m often critical of the difficulties that the JavaScript ecosystem presents for new learners. I must say that while this is the case, I’m excited about what’s on the horizon with JavaScript.

Micro product launches == developer therapy article by Trevor Ewen, on Medium
I read this article earlier about the author’s experiences launching an app created during a two weekend hackathon. There were some solid insights about the importance of clear goals and working toward implementing crucial features in order to ship something on time. This also mentions leveraging helpful tools to speed up the process of developing and shipping an MVP. Great read.

Homebrew Website Club: Insights

We had a great Homebrew Website Club](https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club#Baltimore) tonight with lots of excellent discussion. As always, I learn lots from our conversation and insights and so it makes sense to add these to this writeup! Marty documented our notes here, but I wanted to share my perspective on some things I learned tonight, or things that I’m motivated to further explore.

We had a good conversation about some upcoming web tech trends, such as Glitch, Neocities, and JAMstack services such as GatsbyJS.

Marty did some awesome things with Neocities, and it makes me even more excited to try it out and see if it’s something I can recommend to people looking for a quick portal to a web presence. Glitch continues to fascinate me. I’m very interested to learn more about it since it offers an extremely useful and valuable service. This is definitely at the top of the list of things on my radar!

We talked a lot about Hugo and the drawbacks that come from it being so incredibly freeform. There is such a level of nuance in the way that each theme relates to content, and this has a consequence of certain things being rather opinionated about how content is organized. I talked with Adam about my Hugo development -> production workflow and we discussed some different ways for doing this. I write all of my notebook content locally, push it to a remote production repo, and then my server has a hook that grabs it and builds the site and serves it. In the past, I’ve loved this workflow and want to emulate it with my general WordPress development.

The JAMstack?

Now, one thing that came up in a rather strange and serendipitous way tonight was the JAMstack and trends in JavaScript for 2018. I was listening to this episode of the Syntax podcast and they discussed three things that I brought up tonight during HWC – Reason, GatsbyJS, GraphQL, and JAMstack. I’ve been interested here and there in the concept of a Headless CMS (particularly a WordPress backend with a React or Vue frontend) and this is essentially one thing that Gatsby offers. We talked about the pros/cons of this approach, and what is meant by “reusable API” in the JAMstack model. I’m going to be doing more research and exploration in this area. This is also very much at the forefront of my radar…

Videos/Course Progress

Daniel Shiffman – Coding Train video on Classes
I highly recommend this excellent (and clear!) introductiont to JavaScript classes. As always, Dan’s series is a huge inspiration for me and a great resource demonstrating effective ways for teaching JavaScript to new learners. This video inspired me to rewrite our Creative Programming objects lessons to integrate classes.

That’s all for now! I’ll be posting more as I continue to write. This workflow seems to work well for me so far. Some of my entries will be more refined and complete than others, but my goal is to start with my notebook where it makes sense and then transfer to my main WordPress site after refinement.

Cheers!