My Fourth Week of Bootcamp

Traverse the DOM

Written by Keisha Shepherd

November 2, 2019

This week we covered API’s and DOMs. We can not look at HTML and grab, modify, add, and remove elements from a webpage. It’s pretty fancy stuff. This weeks challenge for me was time. I just couldn’t get through the activities before class so it was more difficult to get through them beforehand.

My takeaways from this week:

1. Review concepts ahead of class
In class, they don’t teach concepts before they expect you to use them. This means that during the activities everyone just sits looking at the assignment with no idea what to do. So to me, it’s important to review the activities to see what concepts are supposed to be used and then either do a tutorial or watch a video of someone teaching it for free on youtube. I will definitely be doing this from now on.
Also, after the first class, they abandoned slides so there are only activity examples the instructor does and then what the students are supposed to do. But the instructor activity doesn’t always cover what is expected in the student activity and if you’ve never seen it how can you know to use it.
An example of this was when we first learned about traversing the DOM. The example had element.children and element.children[0] but the activity solution had an element.lastElementChild and element.previousElementSibling. Which were never discussed. A lot of this class requires you to learn on your own. So in a lot of ways, I still feel self-taught but with guidance with the comments on the homework.
2. Working with others is easier
Nothing can express how nice it is to have someone beside you catching your errors and throwing out ideas. If I ever get a chance to pair program I think I will do that. Especially since someone else can bring a breath of fresh air to a problem
3. Don’t do too much
Okay, my homework assignment from Week 3, I overdid it. I mean really overdid it. I created a password generator and the javascript was over 300 lines of code, with bad practices all throughout it. I couldn’t even look at it and anyone that did look at it did not have good things to say about it. Now the thing is it worked and I was happy. But I saw another student did it in 50 lines of code and I was in shock. It took me probably about 13 hours to do the homework the first time, but I was able to redo the javascript starting from scratch in an hour this time. Lesson learned here is don’t overthink it, create a plan, and stick to it. Pseudocoding the second time really helped a lot.

Overall the class is improving and I’m actually being challenged. The challenge really is with completing assignments without the information in any kind of example ahead of time...so that will be going into my feedback. This class would be a lot better if there was a book or chapter to read before class then we just did activities with something to reference. I think I’m going to head to the library and get a book to carry with me for whatever is coming next.