I’ve spent more time than I’m comfy sharing just reading this week. I also spent a lot of time working on my static site generator which I would like to wrap up no later than April. I’m tracking my progress in a Markdown file, which I pushed to a public github repo last week. Heading to a WWCDC frontend lab this week so many I can get some help with wrapping this up.
Anyway, these are this week’s roundup of links/resources is all (well mostly all) about learning!
- The Anatomy of a Modern JavaScript Application: As always, some of this I knew but it helped with filling in my gaps about why bundling is a thing, and transpiling (I only very recently learned those exist). When you’re first learning to program, you’re thrust into the world of tools and no one really explains why these tools are even needed. Why can’t you just use your notepad and FTP program. Yes google helps, but we all know lots of resources are created & shared by people who also don’t know the reasons why they’re doing things and just doing them. Rinse & repeat.
- This CodeNewbie podcast helps explain what an interpreter and compiler is.
- JavaScript Modules: So I was trying to finish off my Node.js course and ran into this issue with my Atom text editor when I started noticing conflicts with emmet & autocomplete plus snippets. They were competing for tab key’s functionality. That took me down a rabbithole, I found a fix BTW (here). One of the snippets that didn’t pop up the weay I should was the require module which is part of CommonJS.
- Basically before ES6 (or ECMA2015) there was no built in infrastructure for module imports and Node.js filled that in with the require module. This is covered in the Node.js course I’m taking and I learned it while at General Assembly but not enough explanation was provided for the why and I’m glad that my rabbithole adventures led me to this info. Not that not knowing stops me from being productive but sometimes knowing why things are the way they are under the hood can help me just understand a concept.
- This article explains different export/import formats using the Common JS module.
- HTTPS explained with carrier pigeons: I’m planning to do a read up on HTTPS and other web protocols and found this article while cleaning my bookmarks and email newsletter backlog. It was written in the plainest language but I’d love to see visuals because that is my learning style for some of these concepts.
- Understanding bytes and bits, and what that has to do with a 32 or 64-bit processor
- Picking a JS framework to learn: I listened to this podcast and enjoyed it about. I don’t consider myself a big podcast person but I’ve enjoyed the ones that I’ve encountered. Sarah gives good advice on picking a framework and discusses what she likes about Vue.js, which is something I’d like to dig into this year.
- Lastly, a guide to how computers process information: This was very fun to read. Yes, fun. I remember when I first started learning JavaScript, I had to do a math refresher to understand binary system and decimal. The thing is, although I understand how computers read numbers using the binary system, I didn’t really know the why or how. This article does a good job at introducing that topic because I know there is more to it. I’d like to explore this more but I’m happy to get this kind of information in doses. And if you need a math refresher… check this out.