Where did it all go wrong

It must have been about 10 years ago when I first did some JavaScript and at the time I thought it was pretty good, I only used it on and off between then and university but with no real direction. I enjoyed JavaScript that much that I didn’t think twice about using it for my final year project at university, at the time Web2.0 and AJAX was all the craze but no libs existed and everything had to be done by hand. I was struggling to find a project in my final year and I happened across a geospatial professor at university and with google maps not having been out long I set about creating a geoblog that could be updated via email. it was a PHP backend with a Javascript and XML front end, there was just an index and everything, management, logins, maps etc was dynamic.

Cutting edge stuff! and yet I hated it, it took the magic out of the process and after I finished that project I vowed never to touch it again! well until I was forced into it…

Learning from the ground up

Last week I was sort of forced into it, although the week before I took my self to that pain so I am some what to blame.

Either way, I decided that this week would be a learning week so I’ve been going through W3 Schools and Code Academy to re-familiarise myself with JavaScript. I’ve got to say the Code Academy stuff was good and I’d recommend it to anyone that wants to learn how to program.

I found it useful to recap the stuff I could remember and I learnt a few things too, but then I came across This this which does a good job of explaining why certain ways of doing things are better.

I imagine that all of this reading and learning will help a little but I don’t do that good with reading… practicals are always good, so next week will be all about actually doing something with Node.js

Making something good

One of the big reasons for learning a language is to use it, and by having a practical use for it it helps motivate you to do more, luckily there is a project that we started and I have purpose. My role is the web UI / server side of a larger piece of work, luckily I have some help… Hopefully in a month or so i’ll be able to give out some more details but it will be a little while to get it up and off the ground and sort of doing what it’s meant to in a prototype style. If we can pull it off it’s fair to say it will revolutionise how we currently work and provide a good platform the managing what we do, really looking forward to getting it to the basic prototype phase so we can start iterating on each bit until it’s perfect!