This was probably my favorite week yet. Some of the concepts are starting to stick, my ability to think programmatically is improving. We went into Javascript and jQuery a little more in depth. The concept of scope was covered extensively. My prior experience helped out immensely.
And to get into my prior experience. My first formal introduction into programming while we had a Clinton in the White House. Things were rosy. There was a Dot Com boom. Geocities were a thing. In Ms. Futch’s class we learned Microsoft Visual Basic. I was always adept at following instructions and understanding what makes instructions clear, so inputting instructions into a computer felt natural to me. Our programming teacher had no programming experience, and as the course went on, I began helping my fellow students out with our work more and more. It all seemed so simple to me. Maybe it had something to do with the simple nature of Visual Basic. Dragging and Dropping UI elements around and assigning simple logic.
That year I learned of programming competition for high school students put on by Black Data Processors of America. I eventually made it on the team. That summer we learned a lot as group on how to work as team to build a Minimally Viable Product and pitch it to mock customers. I bet that back then they probably were not even called MVPs, proto-MVPs. We did go on to lose at the National competition, but I learned several lessons. I would go on to the other programming competitions, and did just okay. My limiting factor was my slow typing.
Back into Javascript. This weeks homework assignment was to a RPG game. One fault I have is that I do not pseudocode. I start my thought process by tackling the lowest level functionality and build from there. And as I code I address the problems as they come up. Maybe if I used pseudocode I could write code with those problems in mind, instead of reacting to these problems. Writing this game was pretty fun. I did not write it as dynamically as I could have, but everything works. In the future I will try and do less hardcoding. For this project I found Stackoverflow to be an amazing resource. It answered many jQuery questions I had. It is so useful that I cannot wait until I know enough to answer questions and give back to the community.
Here is a link to my completed RPG. The Github for the project is here.