Professional Presence Update 1 & 2

As you may know, I'm in the first-ever cohort of the first-ever "nanodegree" program on Udacity, which is designed to shape me into a mighty fine front-end developer. As part of this program, I am to update this blog with some writing about what I've done so far.

In fact, by this point, I'm supposed to have written two of these professional updates, but I thought the first couple of projects we did were too trivial to cover on this blog, and besides, nobody at Udacity was checking here for the writings—this isn't for course credit. All the same, I do enjoy writing, and keeping in touch, and it's good to maintain a web presence, so let me wax chatty for a bit about this new education I've undertaken.

I'm at a Starbucks rn btw

First of all, the FEWD Nanodegree home page suggested this program would take 6-9 months, given roughly ten hours per week, so I am a little bit surprised to have breezed through the first four projects in under a month. I'm guessing that my degree in computer science has given me a leg up. Only two projects remain for me to do, one of which is yet to be announced.

The projects all present opportunities to go beyond the specifications of the grading rubric, but given the triviality and (let's be honest) mostly inconsequential nature of these early projects, I haven't taken it upon myself to go to town with them. I've been encouraged to post these projects up onto a public portfolio, but haven't quite fleshed them out enough to want to show them off. My focus has been to get through the program as quickly as possible, so that I won't have to pay for extra enrollment, which is by the month. Besides, what I really want is to learn front end development for my own projects, rather than pour my heart and soul into these academic exercises.

I sound dismissive of the program, but honestly I have been learning quite a bit, giving a good twenty hours or more per week to grind through the coursework. At the start, I'd barely ever written a line of JavaScript. Now I can safely say that I am comfortable reading and writing in JS. It's been interesting to learn about its object-oriented properties, and I'm thrilled to be starting to get the hang of jQuery and AJAX, which give me the power to do lots of fun interactive things with websites. I feel like I was a bit deprived of this in my undergraduate education, but I can see why they didn't teach it there: we were focused on heavier, more theoretical and abstract work, things that were harder to get the hang of, less immediately useful but potentially more powerful and useful in the long run.

If you're interested in looking at the FEWD work I've done, have a look at my UH site. It's raw, but it's all there: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~dwilkie/udacity/frontend/... And please do stay tuned for my revised portfolio and more exciting work.

Thank you for checking out my blog. Aloha.