I’m behind with my writing, but I’m getting close to catching up to where we currently are in the curriculum at Lambda. So, this one is about the Challenge for the first Sprint in Unit 2: Applied JavaScript. I actually did this twice. I completed it once in WEB23 and a second time in WEBPT10. Both times, I scored a 2, which means that I met MVP. I didn’t complete any stretch goals to push it to a 3, but I demonstrated my understanding of the DOM, DOM Events, Components, HTTP GET requests, and the axios library.
The Challenge was called Lambda Times and it emulated the front page of an online newspaper. If I remember correctly, we had to grab data from an API at Lambda, which consisted of article information, then we had to iterate through the data and render it onscreen. The data was just a title, author and author image. There weren’t actual articles to link to behind anything.
The first time I did it, I had a hard time pointing to the right parts of the data. It was an array of objects, with nested elements, of course. That’s something that’s intimidated me for a while, but I’ve finally gotten familiar enough with snaking through nested data that I can do it pretty reliably. It lends credence to the idea I’ve heard from other people at Lambda that even though we’re able to complete projects and pass Sprint Challenges, sometimes understanding doesn’t happen until later on. Regardless, the second go at it was definitely smoother.
I was looking at my student dashboard to see what my TLs said about each run, and the feedback was pretty different for each. For the first run, my WEB23 TL highlighted that the cards had been rendered programmatically (which was difficult for more than one person in my original cohort). He pointed out that I needed to focus on knowing the output from Object.Keys or knowing the process of looping through something, and in this case, using for…in to access the nested articles.
My 2nd TL, from WEBPT10, commented that I’d done great in completing the challenge and that I had a good grasp of axios and JavaScript components. He suggested that I try to do the stretch goal, which was to implement a carousel. I didn’t know enough to do it then, but if there’s time during this hiatus, I might attempt it now (and I might also use lorem ipsum text to generate articles to link to). I remember at that time, I’d gotten used to axios and I’d also begun rewriting my portfolio and using JavaScript components to display different parts of it, instead of having individual pages for everything, so I was actually using what we’d learned in a personal project.
Looking back at it now, I can see how the DOM and JS component lessons transfer directly to React, which has been my main focus as of late. Its interesting to see how performing basically the same types of tasks in vanilla JavaScript and with React contrast. Its also interesting to see how the implementation of each differs (with React’s components incorporating so many more technologies like JS, JSX and additional libraries) as a norm compared to plain JavaScript just being coupled with axios and having to reach outside for HTML and CSS to complete the same tasks. The process is definitely more streamlined in React, although initially, it was completely alien to my way of thinking.
REDO FROM START 