Post Bootcamp Blues

Hi Ya! Lola here. So, the Side Hustle bootcamp ended successfully and I miss it already. During the 6-week duration, I was a part of a ReactJS portfolio team and a start-up team. My portfolio team were assigned 4 portfolio tasks which we managed to complete. But because we had to meet the stringent deadlines, we rushed through most of the tasks and are now working on refactoring, post-bootcamp. One of the main take away for me is being able to finally face the hard truth : I need to do something about JavaScript! I'd always known this but managed to avoid it and side step it, choosing to remain in my comfort zone. Well, moment of truth, if i want to be a good ReactJS developer then it's just common sense to make JS my friend right? So, I started a JS refresher, looking at tasks from previous bootcamps and also started a 30days of JS thing on GitHub. Glad to say that I breezed through the basics and was able to remember HOW stuff works so now I'm reading in-depth to also understand the WHY and WHEN. So far, glad to reassure myself that I'm not a complete idiot, I just need to step-up my game.

Random ramblings, questions and scribbles from my notes.

• JavaScript just uses so many big words to confuse us, like what is "concatenation", "string interpolation", " template literals" etc 🙄I wonder what these are called in a different language like Japanese for example.
• Why do we need reverseString function and when would we ever need to use it? This one made me laugh because when I typed it into Google, I found that someone already asked the exact same question on Stack Overflow LOL! Great minds think alike huh 😜. Plot twist: That question got CLOSED on Stack Overflow and was declared as being too ambiguous and pointless. So if anyone has the answer, leave me a comment. I'm really curious. Like are some functions just useless or do people really use them or are we just making functions for functions sake 🙄.
• Learning about undefined and null variables with short exercises to practice them, I wondered why anyone would ever declare variables without assigning them values (i.e. undefined) or make them null. But according to what I saw when I went down this rabbit hole, actually it's possible to have null and undefined variables as a result of human error, so JavaScript assigns them the primitive undefined variable making it easier to debug and catch using the typeof operator for example.

Before I end, here's a love letter to tutorial developers (TD) and technical writers (TW):

Dear TD and TW,

Thank you for the time and effort you put into putting together the amazing lessons for tech newbies like myself. You guys are lifesavers. However, could you kindly also go a little further by explaining the whys behind what you're teaching us? Like when you tell us how to do something, also clarify the purpose and real-life use case scenarios. Thank you so much for your kind consideration.

Best wishes,

Lola