Every time I fell in love with a language, it happened when I started working on my portfolio projects. For each coding project I had ever embarked on, I conducted my own research, reached out to my schoolmates or to LEARN experts for help, and experimented with code. But help from my schoolmates and LEARN experts was usually limited. I was left to figure things out for myself, and these were the times when most of my learning happened. I gained a deeper understanding of the language and framework I was working on and that in turn made me fall in love with it. I have to admit that JavaScript wasn’t a language I thought I would come to even like. After having learned Ruby, the coding language that very much mirrored the English language, JavaScript was a culture shock. I have been spoiled by the ease and flexibility of Ruby. JavaScript was a tedious process of unlearning what I’d already learned. I felt like I was crawling the entire way but I made it out pretty well. In fact, JavaScript has intrigued me so much that I joined Codewars to better understanding JavaScript.
There were times in this project when I struggled to apply my understanding to my code. Prototype was one of them. I reached out to a learn instructor. He made me go on repl.it and he started coding in Ruby (he knew I liked Ruby). He then coded the exact same thing in JavaScript using prototypes! When I saw that translation between codes, it instantly clicked. So I discovered another strategy for understanding new languages: write code in the language you understand and try to replicate the same code using the language you are trying to learn.
There were also moments during this project where I wanted to joyfully shout out loud because I accomplished something without anyone’s help.
I’d like to share one of those moments:
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