The Developing Developer

 Calculator Project The latest project I completed (this past weekend) was a basic working calculator . It turned out to be a bit more challenging than I initially expected. Part of that was my desire to jump in without fully digesting the initial instructions given to me. Once I reassessed the initial instructions, I got out of the first real rut I had found myself in. The main thing that this project centered around was how to hold onto all the different bits of data (numbers and operators) the user entered, and then having the math play out in the same order entered by the user. I had to figure how how to take in one thing at a time into an array, make sure multi-digit numbers were understood correctly, and then apply the correct operator to the numbers input. This was a lot of array manipulation and testing different combinations of multi-digit numbers and the different operators to make sure that different inputs would always give the right results.  Moving Forward The calculator

 "Etch-A-Sketch" The next project I got to work on was called an Etch-A-Sketch by The Odin Project (but is is more like a little drawing application). You can check it out here . It was a pretty fun project and had a few layers to work through--from allowing the user's pointer to make the "pixels" that were drawn change color to also allowing the user change how many "pixels" they get to work with.  Abstraction One thing that held me up for a little bit while working on this project was figuring out how to understand more abstract methods of working with the various elements in my little program. I had to figure out how to grab each individual "pixel" without being able to use the methods that I had used before. Part of this was just overthinking how some parts of my code was working. For example, JavaScript has this method called " forEach() ". It cycles through each element in an Array (or node list in my case). It really is that

 Making A Game I've had the good fun of making a version of the classic game, "Rock, Paper, Scissors" (you can click on the link to give it a try). It's one of the projects from The Odin Project that they give you to practice on. Rock, Paper, Scissors, is one of the biggest projects I've worked on and I really enjoyed the process of putting it all together. It was fun to have the code come together to make everything work well. Rebuilding I actually made a very basic version of Rock, Paper, Scissors to start a few weeks ago. That means I was actually revisiting a project I had make before, with the challenge of making it a lot more user-friendly. I was pretty surprised to realize that I had to rewrite something like 80% to 90% of the code to make it work with a user interface (updating text, interactive buttons, etc.). It was interesting to have to re-solve a problem I had already solved--setting it up differently meant thinking about it completely differently.