What you learning about this weekend? 🧠

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.

Comments

[Best Codes]

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]

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]

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

[Eckehard]

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):

• browserstack.com/automate
• mobileum.com/
• headspin.io/
• lambdatest.com/

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]

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

[Ben Sinclair]

Ooh, and now I have also learned this!

[Best Codes]

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]

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]

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 Follow

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]

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]

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]

Of course - go for it!

[Ashutosh Panigrahy]

All the best!

[Enakshi Pal]

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]

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

[Enakshi Pal]

Thanks Michael! Glad that you've liked it.

[Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli]

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.

[William Torrez]

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]

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

[Mateus Abelli]

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

[Cupcakes]

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.

[Simi Lika]

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

[Jacob Wilson]

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!

[Michael Tharrington]

Oh very nice! Sounds like a cool project and a handy little app. Good stuff, Jacob and hope ya enjoyed your weekend. 🙌

[David Hubber]

Nothing. Just building a website. Love it :)

[Michael Tharrington]

Sounds like a good goal to me. Hope the construction is going well. 🔨