Day 041: Making it Rain (Khan Academy)

Crunch time at work is nearly coming to an end (one more day on Monday), HOORAY!

On average, I worked about 65ish hours per workweek for the past 2.5 weeks. The weekends were not any better since I spent much of the time catching up to sleep or trying to de-compress from the workweek (and also doing some work on the weekends as well, bleh). Not only were the hours long, but the work is really freaking stressful and it involves a lot of literal running around, making snap decisions and solving things.

I have been so exhausted by the end of the day that it has been quite challenging dedicate much time to learning or even retaining any information when I do get to put in more than an hour/day. I admit to coming really short on some days (like 15 mins of tutorial videos before bed and passing out with my laptop by my side, oops). I do get some snatches of reviewing/reading materials on JS here and there during bits of down time at work, but I am not sure how meaningful that is when one is constantly interrupted.

Given how tired I am and how little time I have at the end of the day, the best I could manage was passively consuming videos here and there. Most of the actual coding I did was with the Khan Academy Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation challenges that they have in the course.

The course was such fun and the challenges were really cute! Really a breath of fresh air full of colors and movement at the end of a long, stressful day. Their most complex challenge in the course (and my favorite) so far has been the Make it Rain project. It starts you off simply enough and becomes a bit more complicated in each step. I probably spent about 3-4 hours spread over a few days working on it during quiet times at work or right before bed at home. By the end of the exercise, I was very surprised with all the code written that actually worked and refactored a few times. And the best part was that it all made sense to me!

Make it rain!

I remember looking at someone else's spin-off at the start of the project thinking about how it was impossible to do with my tired brain and limited time and that I should save it until after crunch time at work to be able to make sense of it. I know many people have said this before, but this was the challenge that demonstrated it to me: as a whole, it can seem monumental but when broken down into small parts, it's possible to do!

I initially shied away from KA because the content was geared more towards children and teenagers and I thought it may be too childish for me. Because after all, coding is serious business! *scoffs*

It's great for anyone, particularly those who may be struggling with some of the basic concepts. I honestly think they might have the best approach to introducing brand spanking new learners to JS. I especially like their explanation on object oriented design and object inheritance, the best I've seen yet (I actually understood it! Do also view the videos as well). The instructors teach without making assumptions about you and seem so happy and enthusiastic about it (since they're teaching to kids after all). It doesn't make you feel too bad if you may not get it 100%. I am actually planning on doing a few more of their other courses as fun little breaks here and there from the "serious" learning.