I’ve now completed my second week following along Scrimba’s Front End Developer Journey, and my momentum has definitely slowed down — but that was expected. JavaScript is hard. I really love the design of Scrimba though and am slowly picking up on basic JavaScript concepts (as I struggle to do the pre-made challenges throughout each lesson, then redo them after watching Per show how they’re supposed to be done).
This week I’ve been doing Module 3 — Making Websites Interactive, which builds upon the previous modules’ HTML and CSS skills by adding the all magical JavaScript stuff that I’m really here to learn. Overall it’s one of the longer modules with 177 lessons and more than 8 hours of video. As a newbie coder it’s daunting, but also pretty exciting to see how easy it is to make websites more dynamic. In the past I’ve relied on WordPress and pre-built plugins to do these things, but now I can start to see how to do them on my own.
I started by following along and building the passenger counter which seemed simple but I was surprised by how much went into it. Event listeners, iterations, incrementing, and the DOM are just a few of concepts I can remember going over. Then I moved onto building a blackjack game which added if/else statements, arrays, loops, and Math. Child’s play. Then, after that, I built an actual Chrome extension which had me manipulating local drives, storing data, refactoring functions, and manipulating HTML. To say that my brain is fried, is an understatement.
Each of the projects contain dozens of lessons ranging from an hour to almost 3 hours of tutorials, but actually take more than twice as long because you’re pausing and coding along with each lesson. After each project are a series of challenge lessons which force you to use the code you’ve previously learned. The tutorials for those are short though, only about 20 minutes all together, but the coding for them takes much longer. I’m honestly surprised I got through so much this week.
I’ve got one more set of lessons to get through with Module 3 before I can move on, but I may go back and run through this module again once I am done. There’s just a lot of information crammed into this module that I want to understand better. We’ll see once I get through the rest of it.
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