One of my goals for my time at RC was to increase my fluency with the programmer’s toolkit (particularly the text editor and command line). The volume of blog posts detailing developers’ idiosyncratic configuration files is a good indication of how important these tools are. But every time in the past that I tried to implement someone else’s magical dotfiles, I gave up quickly because I didn’t know enough to tweak unexpected behavior. And every time I thought about writing a script to automate some computer task I had to do regularly for work, I was defeated by an impending deadline, and defaulted to the drag and drop convenience of OSX.

When I got to RC, I knew I wanted to wrap my head around how the web works: I had struggled to wrap my head around clients, servers, and HTTP requests. Tom suggested that I build a simple HTTP server and play around with it. I had followed nodejs tutorials before, so this time I decided I would build everything by reading only the docs. I also wanted to get a better handle on I/O - as the internals of the file system were a mystery to me, so I decided that my little app would search for and serve text from files on my computer.

I presented at the Nashville Women Programmers meetup on algorithms, giving an introduction to Big O notation.

I’ve gotten very comfortable solving problems on CodeWars and Project Euler. This has been great for increasing my fluency in JavaScript, and helping me fine-tune my problem solving skills. But, all the code there is self-contained. No file systems, no servers, and no DOM model. So this week, I’m scaling back on algorithmic complexity and coding up simple interactive games, to help me review the native JS DOM model (for code this small, there is really no need for jQuery).

Dear GitHub,