Odyssey : noun

a series of experiences that give knowledge or understanding to someone

an intellectual or spiritual quest

Hi folks, thanks for tuning in! This is a kinda catch-up post as I have been a bad boy and not blogged weekly as I intended - blame it on the mind-blowing-bending stuff we have learned 🤯 and the need to rest my brain!

I am now calling this series my odyssey because that better encapsulates the path I am on - a bit more epic that a mere functional journey, I think.

So to orient ourselves this is about weeks 2-4 of my odyssey, following week 1 which was an introduction week. This is called the fundamentals block which covers the building blocks of JavaScript which we need to understand to progress to more higher-level and useful ways of using JavaScript. I'm a big fan of fundamentals-first learning.

I'm going to list the topics we have covered and give them a rating based on how well I think I grasped the topic:

🤯 I get what it is about but would struggle to teach it or give a good example

😐 I get it and could probably explain it

🤓 Love it! totally makes sense

Here we go:

• Testing with Jest 🤓
• Array Methods 🤓
• Higher order functions 😐
• Scope 🤓
• Function hoisting 😐
• Difference between a variable's value versus its reference 🤓
• 'Pure functions' 😐
• Testing side effects of functions with no return value with jest mock functions 🤯
• Closure 😐
• Destructuring 🤓
• Higher order functions
• Recursion 🤯
• Object Orientated Programming 🤓
• Factory functions and this keyword 🤓
• Constructor functions and instance methods 🤓
• Class syntax 🤓
• Callback functions 😐
• HTTP requests with Axios 🤓
• Promises and .then() and .catch() 😐

Wow! what a list - we covered so much in 3 weeks. It was not all plain sailing but we will be getting a lot more practice so I am confident the majority will sink in, in time.

Bring on the back end!