Docendo discimus: by teaching, we learn.
I graduated college about 3 years ago now (in 2013), and haven’t actually done any homework since. IT IS AMAZING! There is absolutely no stress involved with learning anymore, and now I’ve actually grown fond of learning. I already know html and css pretty well so I decided that I’m going to start teaching myself JavaScript because I want to round out my front-end development skill set. I think it’ll be a good addition to my design skills in general. When I started trying to figure it out I found that when I was trying to make sense of JS, I would try to rephrase what was said in the book in to plain English, as best I could, breaking every little thing down step by step. I started to write down questions in a notebook and then typing them out later, so I can fill in the answers once I figured it out. I started doing this mostly because I have trouble reading and retaining information when trying to read a text screen. For novels and random blog posts this isn’t an issue, but when I’m trying to learn something from an e-book or Internet articles I had to up with an active type of system to retain the information I was trying to learn.
So creating this series of blog posts is an extension of that practice. I quickly went from writing down short notes to typing complete(ish) sentences. Rephrased so I could understand it better. In doing so I realized that I was literally teaching myself something that I didn’t know, as if I where a teacher. Then I realized what one of my former teachers once said “I learn more by teaching than studying.” I heard this again while watching a screencast by Chris Coyier about how he was building a site with Jekyll. So I thought that I might as well try to teach what I’m learning, while I’m figuring it out so I can understand it better… fucking meta.
This series is really only meant for me, if other people find it helpful, great! If not, oh well… either way its helping me understand JavaScript better. I also will have all my blog posts saved and archived on github. Since, not only to I use a lot of open source software, I find my self advocating for open source whenever possible, and this is my contribution to that way of thinking.
Oh and I thought I should mention, the first thing I thought of to help myself learn JavaScript was to equate Objects and properties with RPG (role playing game) elements. So you’ll see a lot of references to games like Final Fantasy, D&D, and such. I’m just gonna roll with it, see where it takes me. Maybe I’ll work with the Open Game License since it’s the open source version of RPG game rules, and I find it very interesting.