Javascript programming every day of the week

The next Free Code Camp exercise is to find the length of the longest word in a string (and all of their test strings are free of anything but letters and single spaces). Good points: I had no trouble getting the shape of the solution, and split totally worked great. Actually doing the proper syntax for Reduce required a lot of searching, though, and eventually I basically copied a bit from this webpage about getting comfy with arrays. I should work through that website sometime... Most of the failed reduce trials I don't have copies of, but one that I don't understand is that when I had a 0 in the place I thought was for initial value, right after the anonymous function and before the console.log error-catching readout, here: }, 0);
console.log(foo.length); what I got out of the function was only 0. Baffling. Below is code that works. :)

function findLongestWord(str) {
var words = str.split(' ');
var foo = words.reduce(function(prevWord, thisWord){
if (thisWord.length > prevWord.length) {
return thisWord;
}
else {
return prevWord;
}
});
console.log(foo.length);
return foo.length;
}

findLongestWord('The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog');


I feel like I've reversed a string before... I vaguely remember something about halving the length and swapping things around the middle. But this time, when Free Code Camp asked for it as their very first JavaScript coding exercise, I just looped through the entire thing. Woooo!

function reverseString(str) {
var reverseStr = '';
for (var i = str.length - 1; i > -1; i--){
reverseStr += str[i];
console.log(reverseStr);
}
return reverseStr;
}

reverseString('hello');

At first I had just defined the reverseString variable as "var reverseStr;", and the readout I was getting from that console.log in the loop was "NaNo" "NaNol" etc. Second debugging step, when I made the start point of the loop i = str.length - 1 instead of i = str.length, I got "undefinedo" "undefinedol" "undefinedoll" etc. So in the first case it was trying to add the nothing in "hello"[5] to NaN, since why, the sensible programming language thinks, would I be trying to use an addition operator, +, on anything but a number? I'm not sure why trying to add "o" worked; I suppose JavaScript decided that the o it was getting meant that it should be adding to a string or object or some non-number thing, but that string or object or whatever wasn't defined. It's nice that when it failed at adding it relapsed to concatenating.

...I suspect this is a terrible implementation of reversing a string. Any takers?

The Free Code Camp at this point suggests I should be pairing, and a nice guy in the chat room linked me up with a copy of Screenhero (they've joined Slack and are not taking new signups unless someone already inside invites you in), which they suggest is good for being able to remotely cowork and see everything on another screen... Another guy in the chat suggested coderpad.io or another .io solution instead, as less dangerous and better functioning. What do people think, re: screen sharing programs?

I've been through the first few chapters of the Aquent Gymnasium Javascript Foundations course, but that's momentarily on hold due to the Grim Flash Bugs of Hacking Team... Before that, I had some fun learning how to screw around with developer tools: F12 toggles the modern update of "view source", where you can look if webpages you visit have scripts that log things to the console, look at the scripts and how they're written, interesting stuff like that.

Around the 4th I had the idea that it would be fun to make a program that would show you the layout of the stars on the American flag (the star area is called the "union", apparently) once we added Puerto Rico as a state... And for any number of states, really. My thought was to use the brute-force ability of programs, find every rectangle that contains the right number of stars (like, for 9: 1x9, 4+5, 3x3, 5+4, 9x1) and then compare their proportions to the proportions of the union, and I got all the sub bits working. However, I've gotten hung up on the math, and looping, that breaks the number of stars into possible rectangles. I need something that will return an array of every grouping that adds to the correct number of stars, where the groupings are an even number of rows of length "X" plus any number of rows of length "X-1". (The flag has, in the past, looked like an I-beam).

A friend of mine at Amazon pointed out this online thing for learning to code Javascript, Free Code Camp. The idea is that once you know just enough to be useful, you start being of use by coding actual projects for nonprofits that sign up with them; and then you have a portfolio of work to use to get a job. Sounds pretty great, though today I hit the JQuery section and it popped me over to Codecademy... I did that last year, when it was Code Year ("Learn to code in a year!"), and it's not my style. It takes minutes of cutting and pasting at their direction to be able to shake out a bit of actual information, and they rarely explain the reasons behind anything. I vastly prefer just reading everything at once and having more freedom to build a thing...

But I know much more about CSS, now, so woo!

Going by on my Twitter feed was a "Yay look at this coolness" link to a Kathy Sierra talk about how to learn quickly. "OMG sounds great!" I thought, since I've heard a lot about Kathy Sierra's abilities to show the path of glory in tech. But I found the talk incredibly depressing. These were the gloom-inducing points:

-If you can't master a thing in about three 45-90 minute sessions, it's too big and you should break it up into littler things to learn.

But... So obviously "programming" and "javascript" are too big to learn. But it's fairly cruel to put it on me to figure out how to do anything that tends towards learning with a smaller unit. Say I focused on for loops, that might be small enough, but what other stuff do I also need to be able to have a useful for loop learning environment?

-If you spend a long time being crummy at something you learn that being crummy is how to be

Wheee.

-The best way to learn is to stab at like 2-300 examples of a good thing, over the course of like 2-3 hours. But in web development training, these collections of 2-300 good snippets don't exist.

Ok, then.

I am disappoint. But whatever, I already felt like I should just copy over the Gordon Zhu 6.3 answer to study it and then go try to get some wins elsewhere (either redoing EJ up to this point, or heading into new areas). I suppose a takeaway here is, Yes, go find new code snippets to examine.

People on Amazon and elsewhere seem to agree that they do not grok the Table example, so I was curious to get to it. I also don't read it on first pass. I didn't read the squirrel/phi example last chapter, though, either... This one doesn't seem deeper in the weeds than that, at first pass.

I don't understand polymorphism. Inheritance seems simple, but that may be because I vaguely remember that CodeAcademy Javascript, which I did a year ago, hit that hard. Polymorphism seems like it might be like cell biology... Like, many proteins have zinc fingers, structures that hold out a metal ion to interface with other proteins structures. When you see one, you have an idea what that protein/program is going to be up to. But that's just a guess.

Right now I don't understand something fundamental about wording in Javascript... Like, "line" seemed important in his example, but searching the page, it just suddenly appears in the TextCell constructor. I think it's drawing from the array/object inputs, but I need to track down how. For my own code I suspect I'll be doing a ton of veryLongWordyThingThatExplainsBetter, for awhile.

Happened to find this while setting up a Twitter account: http://www.codenewbie.org/blogs/what-i-look-for-in-a-junior-developer

Nice to see that taking notes and having soft skills are called out as useful. When I trained people in science, taking notes was 1:1 the sign of someone who was going to be more helpful than not.