Week 1 — Backend x DevOps | JavaScript Deep Dive and Ansible

This week's achievements 🏆

• Completed 22 exercises from Exercism JavaScript track
• Reviewed Ansible basics for an exam I have to take tomorrow
• Wrote my first two DEV posts:
  • 

    Are Video Courses Slowing You Down?

    Lars ・ Jun 1

    #discuss #learning
  • 

    How to Pass the CCNA Exam

    Lars ・ May 29

    #cisco #ccna #networking

I'm focusing on backend development first because it's best to concentrate on one thing at a time. However, I need to take an Ansible exam for a degree I'm pursuing. That's why, even though my current focus is on backend work, I’ll occasionally include DevOps tools and technologies in my studies.

Learnings 🧠

• As outlined in Are Video Courses Slowing You Down? I'll no longer use video courses to teach myself how to code
• I might make exceptions when the video course provides real value
• It'll take some time to get used to JavaScript, but it's a fun language with cool features

Powerful built-in methods of Array class

I want to briefly touch on two methods I think are really cool 😎.

map()

const deck = [1, 2, 3, 4, 10];

function seeingDouble(deck) {
  return deck.map((card) => card * 2);
}

seeingDouble(deck);
// => [2, 4, 6, 8, 20]

• It takes the original array and doubles each card
• It returns a new array with the doubled values

filter()

const playlist = [
  'The Treasure - Fra Lippo Lippi',
  'After the Fall - Klaus Nomi',
];

function deleteTrack(playlist, track) {
  return playlist.filter(t => t !== track);
}

deleteTrack(playlist, 'The Treasure - Fra Lippo Lippi');
//=> ['After the Fall - Klaus Nomi']

• It filters out every track that matches the argument passed to the function
• It returns a new array without those tracks

Goals for next week 🎯

• Focus on JS for another two to three weeks → complete as many exercises as possible
• Skip any of the DOM browser stuff
• Learn HTTP on MDN Web Docs → will be essential for working with REST APIs
• Dive into async logic, Fetch API
• Write a blog post about how to use Python for network automation

Once I get to Node.js, I'll start writing my first CLI apps and upload them to GitHub.