Author: Glen Young
Listen to your heart
JavaScript is responsible for the behaviour of your website/app. At the heart of affecting the behaviour of the page is listening for user interaction events. These are things like button clicks, key presses and drags and drops. To do this, first we select an element then we add an event listener. To add an event…
This is our concern, Dude
In web development, there’s a concept called “the separation of concerns” between your HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Each language plays a role in web development and it pays to remind ourselves what these roles are: HTML = Structure CSS = Appearane JavaScript = Behaviour There are some overlaps between them, but this should be minimised…
DOM DOM DOM
Playing with the DOM is all about adding interactivity to your page. The DOM (Document Object Model) is the interface between your JavaScript and your HTML+CSS. The browser takes all the elements of your page and turns it into a JavaScript object. All the elements of the DOM for your page are contained in the…
GitHub flow
I’ve recently been attempting to contribute to some open-source GitHub projects with varying degrees of success. One thing that’s extremely useful to do before you start contributing is to develop a basic understanding of the standard GitHub workflow. It’s not especially complicated but it can be a real faff if you don’t do it correctly…
Load scripts last
So you’ve got your HTML and CSS sorted and you’ve started to drop in some customs scripts to make things a bit interactive. To keep things in shape it pays to develop some good habits early on. One such habit is placing your scripts just before the closing body tag like this: We do this…
No Comments
When I was first learning to code, something that came up a lot was to always comment your code. Code comments have value, but despite what my teachers at the time may have thought, you should try not to rely on comments. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t communicate to the reader what the code…
DRY variables
The concept of DRY code is simple, Don’t Repeat Yourself. So if you look at some code you’ve just written and notice it’s looking a bit moist, AKA the same stuff repeating over and over, there’s a good chance it’s an opportunity to refactor. This is also true with variable declaration. Take the this example:…
Equals vs equals
In JavaScript not all comparisons are created equal… see what I did there. Let’s say we’re comparing two values like this: The use of “==“ will compare two values regardless of their type, so in this example, it will return “The meaning of life is 42”. Used correctly this can be fine of course, but…
Zombie code
Part of developing (and certainly learning to develop) is creating code, commenting it out, and creating a better version. As you get into a flow state with coding it’s really easy to get into the habit of doing this and not going back and clearing out the undead code comments. Here’s an example of what…