JS Katas

I decided to try JavaScript. I was suggested to try test-driven learning. While I was familiar with the concept of test-driven development, I wasn’t aware test-driven learning was actually a thing until today. I was pointed to JS Katas which does exactly that.

You are expected to fix tests and in that process learn the concepts as well. I wasn’t really sure how the whole test-driven learning would work, but I decided to give it a shot anyway. Picking JavaScript itself is an experiment. What’s wrong with another one?

The service has exercises for different versions of ECMAScript. One has to pick an exercise, fix it and then move on to the next one. The objective is to make all tests pass, leave the assert lines unchanged!.

Initially, I was finding it difficult to figure things out. I was jumping between the exercise tab and the documentation tab. Then I found myself just going around the documentation alone led by my curiosity. I found it difficult to bring attention back to the JS Kata exercises.

Somehow, I managed to complete around 7 exercises. I was able to get the tests to pass. That was the only metric of completion. Soon, it started to get boring and I was losing focus and was getting easily distracted by my mind.

The next day, I managed a few more exercises. Then I started to get distracted again. I started to feel that test-driven learning probably didn’t suit me. I took a break and went looking for other traditional alternatives - structured courses with a syllabus and instructed by an instructor and which had interactive exercises with ample explanation. I didn’t want to go around digging in the documentation. I didn’t feel that was an effective way to learn anything new.

I recalled that back in my college times, I had done research on various programming languages and had collected a list of online courses that I could take. At that point, my ambition was to become a programmer. Since I was still in college, I probably didn’t look at paid solutions either. Now, the next thing to do was to find that list of courses. Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to find the list back from 2013. Funnily, it had courses listed from CodeSchool which got acquired by PluralSight in 2015. Anyway, I found an Introduction to Javascript course on Codecademy from my list. I decided to take it up. It was nice to go back to a platform that you’ve been dormant for 6 years and find your ‘achievements’ all still there intact.

The course started slow, because I already had some basic knowledge of the language. It wasn’t like I was totally ignorant of the language. It was just that I wasn’t aware of all the latest and greatest features that the language had introduced in the past few years. Let’s see how this goes.