During this sprint we were presented with several short JavaScript challenges (katas). Not only was this meant to help us strengthen our skill in JavaScript, it also helped us understand our approach to problem solving. Here are some of my thoughts!
Conquering the Mind-Boggling Object Manipulation Challenge
The first thing that comes to mind here is the manipulating objects kata, where we had to add Ben as a property to the value of the Terah children property. Ben had to be an object with a key name and a value "Ben". That whole sentence blew my mind the first time I read it. It felt like one of those illusion paintings and the deeper you look the more you see.
So yeah, I was just like 🙄 looking at this problem. I spoke it out loud several times. Wrote it out in smaller steps. Wrote out each part of the problem, just really trying to break it down so that my brain could comprehend what was happening. I looked at the Object Anatomy to understand how Ben had to be an object, but also a property, and started building from there.
I knew Ben had to be an object with a key name and the value Ben. So I built the ben object, to visualize it. Then I needed to have that Ben object be a part of Terah's children property. So I knew how to add a new property that was an object to an existing object using dot notation. But I didn't know how to add the Ben object to that property. I tried a lot of different things, like:
and
but it didn't work. I googled things like How to Add a Property to an object in javascript, and add a property to the value of another object. I looked at things like the Object defineProperty() Method, and how to add a key-value pair to an existing property. Every search got me trying different things. But nothing worked as expected.
Eventually, I turned to chat gpt and gave her my code so far. I asked her for help. Quite literally, this is what I typed "help! How do I add Ben to Terah as a child?" Clearly, I was desperate 😂 Chat gpt was great help, and showed me that I could use dot notation to just continue the logic here...
Seeing it like that made so much sense.
The Art of Elegant Problem-Solving: Capitalizing Strings
I think I solved the capitalize problem quite elegantly. I really broke it down into its smaller components and quickly realized that .map() doesn't work on strings and would need to create an array first. I used console.log to log every step while I was problem solving this so I could see what every step was doing, which really helped as well. I also feel quite happy with my variable names this time. Using console.log was also reassuring throughout the problem solving as it allowed me to see that I was heading in the right direction and gave me confidence while working on this.
Reflecting on Problem-Solving Techniques
I feel pretty confident with most of these, except maybe reading error messages and pseudocode. I like the idea of pseudocode as it provides a structured approach to problem-solving. However, I think I still struggle to write effective pseudocode. While I understand the concept, I sometimes find it challenging to translate my thoughts into clear and actionable pseudocode. It's an area where I'm working on improvement to better plan and organize my code logic. I also have mixed confidence when it comes to reading error messages. While some error messages are clear and provide helpful information, there have been instances where I still struggled to understand the root cause of the problem. I recognize the importance of improving my ability to interpret error messages effectively. Personally, I do feel like I am quite suited to the rubber ducky method as I found it very helpful to speak things through out loud to my "rubber ducky" Bulbasaur.
Embracing the Art of Asking for Help
I will say, I do take my time before asking for help, even though I feel like I ask a lot of questions. I'll really try to exhaust everything before I reach out in discord. Before joining the bootcamp I asked my brother (who is a developer) for any tips, and he said "don't be afraid to ask questions." And he's right. I believe I will only get out of the bootcamp and this experience what I put in, and that includes asking as many questions (even if they feel stupid) as I need to. That is the beauty of doing the bootcamp, the fact that we have the facilitators and other students working alongside us. And it's the thing I missed when I was trying to teach myself how to code back in the day. Sure, I probably could have reached out in a forum like stack overflow, but the context for all of us at this bootcamp is the same, which is super helpful.