Michael Tharrington for CodeNewbie

Posted on Dec 16, 2023

What you learning about this weekend? 🧠

#codenewbie #discuss #learning #beginners

Hello folks 👋

What are y'all learning on this weekend?

Whether you're sharpening your JS skills, making PRs to your OSS repo of choice 😉, sprucing up your portfolio, or writing a new post here on DEV, we'd like to hear about it.

Hope you enjoy your weekend and have a good time soaking up that knowledge.

Top comments (34)

Best Codes • Dec 16 '23

I learned about JavaScript private class field methods:

class Person {
  #name;

  constructor(name) {
    this.#name = name;
  }

  getName() {
    return this.#name;
  }
}

const person = new Person('John');
console.log(person.getName()); // Output: John
console.log(person.#name); // SyntaxError: Private field '#name' must be declared in an enclosing class

JavaScript allows you to define private members within classes using the # symbol. This feature helps encapsulate internal implementation details and restrict access to certain parts of the code.

I just thought that that was cool. So that's what I learned! I don't really have something I'm currently trying to learn, but I inadvertently learn something every time I code, LOL.

Eckehard • Dec 17 '23 • Edited

private class fields are a relatively new feature, so it may not be available on older browsers. It was released on edge in 2020, firefox in 2021, but chrome, Opera and safari know this feature sinds summer 2023. Check out caniuse.com to see, when it was implemented on a certain browser.

If you use only features, that are available for more than 2-3 years, you are relatively save your code will run on most machinces. To use the latest features check, if it can be polyfilled by babel.

Best Codes • Dec 17 '23

That must be why I just learned it! I use Opera. Thanks for the website link, it's handy!

Eckehard • Dec 17 '23

Your welcome! There are so many features in Javascript that it is hard to keep an overview. Even after years you will find things you did not know.

If you use JS operators that are not known to a browser, execution might stop, so your page will not respond or - as a worst case - the user will just see a blank page. To avoid this, cross browser testing is a good idea. Luckily, there are lot´s of services you can use (most of them offer paid service):

Just no name a few.

From my own research I can tell, that if you check browser versions dated 2 years back, your code will run on most devices in the wild.

Best Codes • Dec 18 '23

Thanks for the information! I will definitely have to test my websites and web apps now…

Ben Sinclair • Dec 17 '23

Ooh, and now I have also learned this!

Best Codes • Dec 17 '23

Yep! That's what the community is for. Maybe you can share something awesome that I won't know, and then I can say the same to you 😊.

Monty Harper • Dec 16 '23

I'm learning about the job search process... I'll be working hard on that over the next few months. Here's my to-do list so far; what do you think? Is anything missing? Are there some things I should prioritize over others?
- update resume / linked-in
- networking activities
- research companies I’d be a good fit for
- interview prep / technical prep / Leetcode
- pair coding
- find a mentor
- open source / volunteer work
- work on my own apps / build portfolio
- publish my app
- take additional classes
- apply for jobs

Michael Tharrington • Dec 17 '23

So much good stuff here, Monty! Nothing else pops into mind immediately, but if it does I'll let you know!

I suppose one thing that you can add to the list is continuing to document your learning experience here on DEV. (Haha, is this considered a shameless self-plug?) But for real, if I was considering hiring you, I feel like I could learn a lot about your experience from reading your posts and interactions here. Anywho, I hope it's been fruitful for ya and hopefully we can be another piece of your overall portfolio.

As for finding mentors and groups to work with, one place that I often suggest folks check out is Virtual Coffee. I'm pretty dang sure they have regular meetups and think they'd be a fun crew for you to look into. I know a few folks on their team and they're good people. ☕️

Virtual Coffee

Virtual Coffee is a laid-back conversation with developers twice a week. It's the conversation that keeps going in slack. It's the online events that support developers at all stages of the journey.

Also, I'm thinking I'm going to start up a regular piece of content in the new year to help mentors and mentees find one another in the comments, so be on the lookout for that!

Monty Harper • Dec 17 '23

Hi Michael, of course I should include "posting to Dev" on my list! It was in my head - maybe just because I've already been doing that, it didn't come to mind as a new activity. But I need to make room for it in my schedule for sure. And any help with finding a mentor would be great because I have no idea how to go about that. I'll check out Virtual Coffee and watch for your mentor matching posts in the new year! Thanks!

Michael Tharrington • Dec 18 '23

Haha, hey it's one thing you can add to your list and cross off cause you're already doing it. 🙌

Also "mentor matching" flows quite nicely... would you be cool with me potentially using your verbiage for the title of this series when I get around to launching it?

Monty Harper • Dec 18 '23

Of course - go for it!

Ashutosh Panigrahy • Dec 18 '23

All the best!

Matt Ellen • Dec 18 '23

I spent this weekend learning about flutter and dart. I started working through the dart cheatsheet

I'm hoping it's easier to maintain than Cordova is, because, despite being relatively easy to make apps with, getting all the versions of everything to line up was a nightmare. In the end I had to give up because I couldn't get the version of node I needed to run on my laptop.

Enakshi Pal • Dec 19 '23

I have penned down some practices during this weekend, which we often tend to ignore while coding.
Want to know?
Have a look at my new blog!
Are we following the Best Coding Standards?

Michael Tharrington • Dec 19 '23

Awesome stuff, Enakshi. This looks like a good one! 🙌

Enakshi Pal • Dec 19 '23

Thanks Michael! Glad that you've liked it.

Cupcakes • Dec 17 '23

This weekend I was introduced to the Signals library by a video on YouTube by the Web Dev Simplified channel. I'm going to dive into a little later today. It looks like it might be a good addition to my workflow for React projects. I'm gonna test with Next.js and see how it works between server/client components.

Mateus Abelli • Dec 17 '23

I'm learning about Ansible and how to make a setup to bootstrap my configs on new machines as fast as possible

I'm also learning UX, recently how to create user personas and work with demographic info

Simi Lika • Dec 17 '23

I am learning about POS invoices for Property Information Management System (PIMS) in Python(Django Rest Framework)

William Torrez • Dec 16 '23

I am learning about returning data in Perl

sub some_function {
my @args = @_;
# do stuff
return \@array1, \@array2;
}
my ( $arrayref1, $arrayref2 ) = some_function(@some_data);

Best Codes • Dec 16 '23

How cool! I'd like to learn more Perl sometime, I barely know any.

Jacob Wilson • Dec 18 '23

Right now I’ve been learning React through a course on Udemy. 📚

I decided to take a small break from the tutorials and focus on small projects so that I could get a handle on what prop drilling is and learn how to avoid these issues in the future with some basic patterns and techniques.

In learning this, I’ve made a todo app with some basic features like theme toggling, adding and deleting todos, and separating the todos into categories. I’m also trying to add a drag and drop feature using react-beautiful-dnd ✅

Happy Coding Everyone!