Contents
What I did today
Setting up a study group.
Yesterday, I had posted on Mastodon and Twitter looking for a study partner. To my pleasant surprise, more than 1 person responded and expressed their interest! No longer was using Element/Matrix going to be enough.
I asked for alternatives and the Mastodon community happily obliged (fantastic group of people!). Late into the night, I settled on using Zulip Chat. Zulip was one of the suggestions listed by Vincent Tunru. It fit the bill for several reasons:
- It’s FOSS, which was a baseline criteria.
- One of the things I want to do is… when the study group disbands, send each member a copy of the data and delete the organization/team. Zulip makes this possible.
- It has a free plan that more than works for our needs for a couple of months. No sysadmin work. Self-hosting is great, but my focus is on getting things done with minimal hassle.
- Apps for all major platforms. This signalled, to an extent, product maturity.
We now have Chris Burnell, Arpit Batra, TyChi, Josias, and Suraj Wate participating already, with spectral_shadow and potentially another Mastodon member yet to join us.
I’m so excited to be doing this together with other developers from the community. We all carry different levels of expertise in different tools — ranging from just-starting-to-learn-JavaScript to working-with-ReactJS-for-5-years. The one thing that’s common is our interest in having a community to learn with and bounce ideas and problems off.
We’re writing down our goals at the moment and are nearly there as a group. Here’s a sneak peak:
React for Beginners by Wes Bos.
Started Wes Bos’ course titled React for Beginners. Once again, it’s good to have someone else do the roadmap and for me to just focus on the content.
Today, we walked through the development environment and discussed what components in ReactJS are.
The course can be finished in just a couple of days; I’m going to try and take up a similar pace, with a goal to finish this course in 3 to 4 days. Thereafter, I’ll continue with Max’s course on Udemy which, apart from dwelling on the basics, picks up even more related tools that are popular in the ReactJS community.
My choice of courses might change depending on how the study group feels about paid courses, which I agree is a barrier to entry. We may also opt to use different courses but have a place to come back to to discuss our problems together.
JavaScript30 – a simple clock.
Continuing JavaScript30, today I built a simple CSS and JavaScript clock.
I felt this was simpler compared to the first exercise.
However, this was the first time, at least in a long while, that I used the transform-origin CSS property and its usage in this exercise was a perfect use-case!