My Fifth Week of Bootcamp

By Keisha Shepherd

Written 11/10/2019

Well, I made it through another week of Bootcamp. Yay!

Up to this point, we’ve learned HTML, CSS, Javascript and finished up JQuery. This week was tougher because the homework was on javascript due at the end of this course but we were learning JQuery at the same time...and the homework was not supposed to use any jquery. JQuery and Javascript are very similar. For example to set the text on a heading with an id named “heading-id” one uses ‘=’ the other uses parenthesis().

HTML:

<h1 id="heading-id"></h1>

Javascript:

document.getElementByID("heading-id").textContent = "New Heading"

JQuery:

$("#heading-id").text("New Heading")

New HTML:

<h1 id="heading-id">New Heading</h1>

So you can see they are very similar and debugging can be hard if you forget to use an equals sign versus a function.

Which brings me to the first lesson learned:

1. Do Homework Before the Next Week Starts
Like I said Javascript and JQuery are really similar and mixing the two resulted in quite of few moments of not understanding why my changes weren’t updating in the browser. Which is why learning about debugger made a huge difference. Also, looking at the google chrome inspect capability made a huge difference. I don’t know how anyone was doing this before without it. Just like I find it hard to believe there used to be a world without atm machines and credit cards. How did you buy anything?
2. Read and Reread assignments! Ask for suggestions early.
I misinterpreted the Javascript homework to mean we should do *everything* in Javascript. I didn’t put anything into HTML body tag or in CSS files. I created, set, added functionality, and styled everything using Javascript. This led to a lot of sleepless nights over the week. And I could not figure out why it was taking so long. When the instructor saw what I did he was not impressed. I didn’t want to start over, I already put a lot of time and energy into making it work. But I was able to help another student finish hers in a few hours doing it the way the TA suggested! Which was pretty cool. Another thing I noticed which adds time to assignments, is that I like to do more than asked. This leads to a lot more time being spent on assignments than I may have before it’s due. The assignment was to make a coding quiz. Check mine out here. If I had more time, I would definitely:
• Have 100+ questions to pull from with 4 topics.
• Add music you can toggle on and off.
• Add correct bing and incorrect buzz sounds
• Add a standard header and footer that I could use similar to the first homework
• Add a way to navigate back to the home page with a navbar logo
• Have the high scores list sorted by highest score.
• Only keep the top 10 scores?
• Create a consistent look with my portfolio
• Add images to buttons and correct messages
It’s not that I couldn’t do all of these things, but in the interest of time, I decided to keep them out and help others with their homework. This is a Bootcamp and plenty more is coming done the pipe.
3. Learning is Up to You, Going to Class is Not Enough
In one of my previous blogs, I mentioned that the class isn’t taught in a way I thought it would be. So I have to spend a lot of time researching the correct way to do things with all of the holes in the class instruction. For example, in all of the reading, and my former work experience, I’ve learned that using global variables is bad practice. But they only teach with global variables. And haven’t even gotten to a slide on constant variables. Because of an article on javascript best practices, I just happened to come across, I changed all of my variables to local variables, reorganized the layout of how I write my code. Knowing these things before I start I think would have been very helpful to me and the instructors grading the work I submit.
I’ve also noticed that even though I’m spending 9 hours in class and 3 hours in office hours, 1 hour in tutoring each week that cost $10,995. I learn a lot more outside of class by reading free articles and watching free youtube videos. Before I start any assignment or new topic, I spend an hour or two watching youtube videos and reading through articles, and it amazes me how much more is covered in a short period of time than in the class. It makes me really want to make my own videos using Screencastify to show the topics in a way I like to learn. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and if I were to do it, I would have slides with definitions of concepts and example usage of those concepts. For example, localStorage I could teach a short video on that in 10 minutes and cover more material than we got in the 9 hours of class time. Then after we’ve seen the definitions, the usage examples, we would do an activity with those concepts. And you would have slides to reference and videos to reference and the activity would be easier for the students because they would have seen the examples.
I’ve also figured out if we are going to be asked to do activities on topics I’ve never seen I don’t like it much. So I really like doing the research before class so that I know what’s happening and what’s being asked beforehand. I really wish the class provided pre-reading materials prior to each class. This week was named third-party API’s and I didn’t have time to research it ahead of time so I felt behind the ball a lot.
4. I heart Keyboard Shortcuts
We use visual studio to write a majority of our code. And the following keyboard shortcuts make life amazing:

Keyboard Shortcut	Keyboard Shortcut Description
Alt+ ↑/↓	Moves lines up/down
Shift+Alt+↑/↓	Copy lines up/down
Ctrl+K+C, Ctrl+K+U, or Ctrl+/	Toggle line comments on and off
Ctrl+Alt+↑/↓	Insert cursor above / below

I printed out a copy of the keyboard shortcuts sheet and carry it around everywhere. Last week, during the study group, for the first time, I used multi-cursor line input to change close to 200 lines of code at the same time.
Whenever I’m working with other students, I am constantly showing them keyboard shortcuts. I can’t help it, I love them so much.
5. Time Management is Essential
My social life, my poor poor social life. I am always looking for ways to maximize my time so that I am as productive as possible now. I even attempt multi-tasking especially during those essential life necessities like eating and sleeping and getting to class. An example of this happened today, while I was eating lunch, I wrote the outline for this blog. This made it easy to sit afterward and concentrate on it. Also, when I drive, I play podcasts and youtube videos about technology or topics we will discuss in class. When I’m ready for bed, I lay down and play a yoga instruction Alexa app. I imagine myself doing the moves without actually having to do them and it makes sleep come a lot faster.
6. Stay in scope on assignments
My last lesson learned is don’t overdo the assignments if you want to have free time. Definitely, do what was asked, then do the bonuses. Always double-check for suggestions. Always pseudocode (which I learned this way I don’t know how to pronounce it) before you start. It helps organize your thoughts before you go all over the place. Make wire diagrams also. It really helps me focus and get through the necessities and I can see when I go out of scope earlier than later.

That’s it for lessons learned. Next week should be a lot more stress-free because I finished the assignment this morning. I stayed in scope, used provided examples, pseudocoded, and got it done. It’s a Day Planner Which I’m actually using now to help plan my day and maximize my time. Now if I want I can easily modify it and make my dream day planner with audio and meditation, a second to enter 3 things that could happen to make the day great.

Lastly, I’m sad to say that my Grandmother, Thelma Shepherd, passed away on Friday 11/8/2019 after enjoying 90 years of life. So this week is going to be challenging as I navigate the loss.