Week 3 at Lambda School was hard. It was called JavaScript Fundamentals, and it really tested my ability to keep up. I never went to bed before 2:30 AM. I was up working on projects and studying every night. There were 2 nights that I went up at 4 AM and on the night before the Sprint Challenge, I went up at 5:30 AM. I was basically an absentee father for most of the day, all week.

Here’s a recap, as best as I can remember. Lack of rest has clouded my head, but so far, this new week (Week 4) has been easier… and yes, that means that I passed the Sprint Challenge.

JavaScript I

Monday was the start of JavaScript Week and was the easiest day. I thought we might go over some of the pre-course topics as a warm-up and then begin exploring new ones on Day 2, but I was wrong. We jumped right into the water.

At first blush, the day’s topics looked familiar enough: variables, arrays, objects and functions. These were all things covered prior to admission. Of course, I hadn’t really touched JavaScript since then. I was focusing on HTML, CSS and LESS, so I was rusty. LESS, from Week 2, resembled JavaScript, and it seemed meant to segue to more complex programming, which is what the week would bring.

Prior to class, we had to watch 4 videos covering function basics, variables, object literals and arrays. These totaled almost an hour-and-a-half in length. There was a lot of information, and it built on the pre-course material without backtracking very much.

Function declarations, invocation, arguments, parameters and return statements were all old-hat, but then we got into hoisting (and two-pass compiling), function expressions, anonymous functions and arrow functions. I was able to follow all of this, so far, and the analysis of using let over var for variable declarations (and the advice to use const until we can’t, and then use let). All of this led to discussion about scope of course; especially with regard to let, var and hoisting.

Object literals came next. I was able to follow along, even though I was out of practice with JavaScript… but then came arrays and my old frenemies .push, .unshift, .pop and .shift. Our project dealt with objects, arrays and then arrow function syntax.

The initial object exercises weren’t difficult. Creating objects, reading object data and using select object methods made sense to me. Arrays began to change that. We had to code answers to problems involving finding specific objects in an array, finding pairs of data in an array, sorting elements of an array and returning the results, creating a new array out of a subset of an old one, listing all items in an array that had a certain mathematical quality in common, and using JSON to show the results of another array we made out of a subset of data from another array. This section really tested me and kept me up all night. Google, YouTube and a bunch of websites were my guides and lack of sleep was my sputtering fuel. I struggled to answer the questions and write code. I didn’t intuit what methods to use and my notes weren’t what they should have been. If not for the power of the internet, I’d probably still be in a strange hell somewhere, trying to code answers to those problems.

I closed out the day by doing function conversion exercises, from the day’s project. These were simple enough, once I was comfortable with arrow functions. The week only got harder though.