Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Ari Zilnik

I’m learning to code (#2) — Quantity leads to quality

This story is part of a series on my experience learning to code at Recurse Center. Go here to start reading from the very beginning.

I’m four weeks into Recurse now, and here’s how I’ve been faring.

Longing for frameworks

I’ve been hacking my way through understanding JavaScript. For many people, working with JavaScript means working with other frameworks like React, Vue, or whatever the flavor of the month is. These frameworks and libraries are incredibly helpful for abstracting away complexity in developing software.

For example, if one’s application includes a text editor which allows users to change text color, font, and size, you can imagine someone at some point has built software to do this.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, one can leverage this pre-built code for your one’s own work. In this way, you can speed past the need to build that functionality from scratch, and deliver it to users.

Starting at Recurse, I wanted to ensure I have a good foundation in just ‘vanilla JavaScript’—that is, writing everything myself to make sure I understood how it works as a whole. Funny enough, as I started showing off my work, people would inevitably ask “what did you use?”, as in “which frameworks are being used in this application?” Frameworks are largely an expectation at this point, to help getting up and running more quickly.

Eventually, my code ended up looking pretty unwieldy.

Keep scrollin’ scrollin’ scrollin’ WHAT?

During a quick and dirty code review, one of my Recurse Center collaborators Yuri Vishnevsky suggested I store my entire app’s state as a single object.

You can think of my code at that point as a football team that has been told to just do what they feel is right as individuals. Some players might have the idea to run, catch the ball, or just stand around. Yuri’s suggestion was basically to instill a coach with a specific play in mind—all of the players could then refer to the coach and the coach would give them all instructions leading to a bigger picture and strategy. Bad sports metaphors aside, I refactored my code to have this one single state object.

When I shared what I had done, almost every single person I shared it with said “Oh, neat. You kind of built your own mini React/Redux. Why don’t you just… use that?”

Enter Vue.js

I decided that I’m going to start practicing and learning how to use Vue.js, which is a JavaScript framework. I’m not going to go into why Vue is better/worse/different/pointless compared to React, Angular, or any other JavaScript frameworks. There are plenty of articles about that, including this one by TechMagic.

I’m learning Vue using Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s Udemy course Vue JS 2 — The Complete Guide and so far so good. This is not an ad for Vue, Max’s course, or any course on Udemy. It’s just what I’m using and it’s working for me.

It’s always nice to have a tiny version of Maximilian in the corner guiding me through Vue.

I must say, my instinct to start off pushing myself to just use Vanilla JavaScript was absolutely the right one. I have had some false starts with React and other frameworks in the past, and this is largely because I didn’t have the fundamentals quite down. This time around, I’m getting the hang of things in Vue, because I am better equipped to understand the core concepts, as well as the problems and limitations for which it tries to solve.

Design and code

As I mentioned in previous posts, one of the biggest benefits of the self-guided approach at Recurse is that it allows one to focus on passion projects. Though I was concerned about being the odd person out, coming in with a non-traditional background, being a designer here puts me in a really prime position. I’ve been able to help with iconography on Brad Dettmer’s ambient weather project, as well as think through interaction problems on Peter Coles’s Full Page Screen Capture Chrome extension.

These experiences only further solidify that the best work is done in groups of motivated people across disciplines, coming at the same problem from different perspectives.

Up next

Though my time at Recurse is coming to an end quickly, I am still feeling as motivated and excited as I did on day one. I have another week and a half to keep doing my best work—to work hard and to keep on coding.

I’m hoping to take that meeting agenda app I mentioned in my last post and rebuilding it in Vue. At the same time, I’m still planning on continuing with Wes Bos’s JavaScript30 course. Fellow Recurser Jessica Scott-Dutcher also pointed me in the direction of the book Eloquent JavaScript, so I hope to go through that book as well.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/49de34c401f788b998cd4f65e0d90e3d/href">https://medium.com/media/49de34c401f788b998cd4f65e0d90e3d/href</a>

Find me on Medium, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

I am a user experience designer from New York. I grew up in Toronto. I’m also the co-founder of SIBlings, a group of designers and developers that design and bring crazy ideas to life. We’re the co-creators of Emoji Salad, an emoji Pictionary SMS game that makes friends out of enemies and enemies out of friends.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

I’m learning to code (#3) — Frameworks and fundamentals was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m learning to code (#3) — Frameworks and fundamentals

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