Hi there! I’m Annie Dumashie, a project manager and front-end developer at Ampersand. As a front-end developer, it is key to improve upon your skills as often as you can. I realised my knowledge in JavaScript was very limited to using event listeners even though i didn’t understand the basic of concepts enough to use the various JavaScript frameworks like React.js , Angular.js and the others. I decided to share my journey on what I have learnt so far.

As most developers know, W3schools is one of the best resources for learning new programming languages and other courses from scratch. Here, I learnt about the benefits of studying JavaScript , the history behind it and where it is today. I also took quizzes on JS Statements, Syntax, Objects, Arrays and other introductory topics in JavaScript to help evaluate how well I understood what I had read so far. It was smooth sailing until I got to Functions. I understood the definition for Functions but when they began to go in-depth, I started getting quite confused. It began from Closures. In some cases, a function was returning another function or being assigned to a variable. This is when my boss came up to me after sensing my confusion and said, “Take a look at the Coffee making machine. It takes water and coffee beans as input and then takes it through a process to give you coffee. Likewise in Functions, parameters are passed to a function as input and returns a value as an output”. Just like that, it all started to make sense. It was like a light had finally been turned on in the upper department. Apart from W3schools, I also used resources like the Mozilla Developers Network (MDN) , Quora, SessionStack, SitePoint to mention a few.

I moved on to Arrow Functions which was introduced with ES6 as a new syntax for writing JavaScript functions. I learnt that it makes code more concise and simplifies function scoping. The aim of writing functions this way is to allow you accomplish the same result with fewer lines of code and approximately half the typing. Surveys how that Arrow Functions re the most popular ES6 feature.

Higher-Order Functions was the next topic. A Higher-Order function is basically a function that accepts another function as an argument and returns a function as a result. The function passed is sometimes referred to as the Callback. This should not be confused with First-Class Functions that can also pass a function as an argument to other functions and can be returned by another function. I know, it can get quite complicated.

This is how far I have come on my journey with JavaScript. I’m not even halfway through but I believe by the end of the week, I would have made greater strides. Coding is not an overnight miracle of knowing it all but constantly learning how to unlearn and figure the best way to solve the problem. Working at Ampersand has given me the environment to learn and helped me learn the relevant things to focus on instead of learning it all without understanding. Improving ourselves is key and we always strive for the best, are you thinking of building an app? We are here to help.