Day / Days of Code: Journey of Learning and Growth

Thu, September 26, 2024

Hey everyone!

First and foremost, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Grëg Häris and the entire Dev team for your unwavering encouragement. When I embarked on the 100 Days of Code challenge, I had only a glimpse of how pivotal Dev would be in my progress. Blogging on Dev has completed the online learning circle for me, integrating everything I learn and testing it in a real-world context. Like Codecademy lessons, learning is social, and being able to post on Dev is a gift, and it’s a multidirectional experience, as I learn so much from all of you, as well.

Overcoming Challenges
Life threw some curveballs my way, which disrupted my blogging schedule. I take full responsibility for this. Despite these challenges, I continued coding, even if it was just an hour a day at times. I had to prioritize, and unfortunately, blogging had to take a backseat. After some reflection, I decided to call my roughly ten days away a suspension. While not blogging isn’t ideal, it was a needed compromise. Picking up at day 78.

Balancing Blogging and Coding
Recognizing that blogging requires effort, I’ve decided to reserve up to two days a week for coding matters other than blogging. I’ll aim to keep this to weekends, but it could be any day. As you may've noticed, my blogging style is homespun, and some of our assignments are becoming more challenging.

Today’s Learning: Arrow Factory Functions
Today, I learned that arrow factory functions behave differently based on the body content style, which can significantly impact their flexibility. Online learning often glosses over these nuanced details, adding an intriguing layer for me to share.

Project Highlight: Outfit of the Day Generator
Take today’s assignment, for example. It started simply: an offline message generator using at least three pieces of data. The idea was to create something like a fortune teller, horoscope, or any message that relates to three bits of information. I opted to create an “Outfit of the Day” generator for fun.

The tricky part came next. I could have kept it simple by creating an object to hold the three bits of data and a message-generating function with a helper function to randomly assign the data parts. However, I wanted to practice factory functions, and this was a perfect opportunity.

Factory functions are not inherently challenging, but they do contain both data and functions. I learned that how the body is written determines how other parts are written and that some parts work implicitly. To get object methods to fully access the object’s data, the keyword function is necessary. Traditional body content style is more flexible, while concise body content style returns objects implicitly. My code below demonstrates concise:

// Object of available outfit items
const items = {
  shirt: ['swag t-shirt', 't-shirt with clever saying', 'sweater', 'hoodie'],
  pants: ['cargo pants', 'jeans', 'chinos'],
  shoes: ['sneakers', 'boots', 'sandals'],
  accessory: ['backpack', 'poof ball hat', 'ball cap', 'sunglasses']
};

// Utility function to randomly select an item in each category
const selectRandomItem = category => {
  const randomIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * items[category].length);
  return items[category][randomIndex];
};

// Outfit factory function
const outfitFactory = () => ({
  shirt: selectRandomItem('shirt'),
  pants: selectRandomItem('pants'),
  shoes: selectRandomItem('shoes'),
  accessory: selectRandomItem('accessory'),
  logOutfit: function() { 
    // Note: ': function' so method can be used with dot notation
    console.log("Outfit:");
    console.log(`Shirt: ${this.shirt}`);
    console.log(`Pants: ${this.pants}`);
    console.log(`Shoes: ${this.shoes}`);
    console.log(`Accessory: ${this.accessory}`);
  }
});

const outfit = outfitFactory();
outfit.logOutfit();

// Output, randomly selected: 
// Outfit:
// Shirt: swag t-shirt
// Pants: cargo pants
// Shoes: boots
// Accessory: backpack

Embracing GitHub Branching
Lastly, this project aims to get us working with GitHub using branching, much like we’ll be doing as prospective developers. Although I’ve informally used Git for a couple of years, branching opens up features like pull requests, merging, and rebasing branches, along with stash and pop or apply, which are new to me.

Happy coding!

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