Today I have been struggling with new vocabulary such as getters and setters (don’t understand them, really) as well as the words truthy and falsy (I understand these perfectly well - they are just annoying words). I have been doing yet another JavaScript tutorial, absorbing just a bit more each time I do one, though I have gotten to that place in the current tutorial (c.65% complete) where I stop understanding the concepts being taught. In failness to myself, though, in the past I have been lost for a much larger percentage of a tutorial, so I guess that marks some progress.

Let me break down my coding skills according to areas with which I concern myself. This is in no particular order of significance.

Web Development & Design: This is particularly broad, but basically I am thinking here of HTML and CSS. I don’t yet include JavaScript in this category because my understanding of that language is so rudimentary. With HTML and CSS, though, I basically know all I need to know to create basic web pages, and I know a bit about organizing whole sites. I do need more experience with these skillsets, but I feel pretty good about my abilities here. If there is anything I could really improve upon it would be CSS, especially learning Sass/SCSS. I wouldn’t mind going over Bootstrap again as well, really tapping into its full capacity. Overall, though, this is where I am strongest with coding.

JavaScript & Interactive Coding: I have done a number of tutorials in JavaScript and jQuery, and I have learned a little bit of Python. What I would ultimately like to do with all of this is to create truly interactive sites that have a bit of a wow factor. One of my primary frustrations with learning JavaScript, though, is that the various tutorials focus the most on printing results using console.log() rather than explaining how to manipulate elements of a web page’s DOM. jQuery tutorials do a better job of this. The real reason for using the console.log() when writing JavaScript, I suppose, is so that the code can be tested frequently as it is being written. I need to do a lot more playing around with JavaScript to truly figure out how useful it could be.

Digital Humanities: I have to say that this is my weakest area of coding, only because I haven’t put anything more than rudimentary effort into understanding this area of academia. I suppose anything related to the humanities that I post on the internet, for instance, constitutes a contribution to the digital humanities, but it must be more depthful and broader than that. One of the nice things about all things internet, though, is the anarchic way most stuff is freely available, requiring no special access to databases or other sources of material. I’m quite sure that if I do some directed literature searches I could find quite a bit available for free. This is something I need to start doing, collecting citations so I can participate in the digital humanities with some academic authority. Maybe I can start with a simple Google search, move on to a search of Google Scholar, and then delve into one or two data-mining tolls such as Google’s Ngram Viewer. This should be fun, in fact, bringing my coding skills into the realm of my broader academic work.