You may have noticed that I’ve been putting off posting this. Well, it’s not really a sign of the outcome of our experiment, life just got in the way. Our 30 day learning sprints were actually quite successful. It’s pretty amazing what you can learn in 30 days.
What is AngularJS in 30 Days?
Back in June my department at work started an experiment. We each took a discipline we don’t know that was work related and for 30 days we would go all in on learning it. I chose AngularJS. There were two reasons: one—I just wanted to learn it, two—I figured it would help me get better at JavaScript in general.
The outcome
I gave myself two overall tasks. The first was to simply complete all the learning material I was able to gather. I’m happy to say that I did, in fact, complete that. The other was to put my newfound skills to use by giving a functional and cosmetic facelift to the website I host my Android Wear watch face downloads on. I did manage to come up with a design for it. Sadly, this is what life got in the way of and I never did get it built. Now that things have calmed down at home and work I only have myself to blame for not getting the web app built. I just have so many hobbies all vying for my attention that this has been put on the back burner. Rest assured, it will get built.
More importantly though, I, without a doubt, am more proficient at JavaScript. One place I leveled up big time is in working with arrays and objects (JSON in particular). Further, I look at code differently now, and write it differently too. In the past I’ve been highly guilty of spaghetti code. Now I’ve started writing ‘smarter,’ reusable and cleaner code. Further, I can write it at a good clip faster than before. All that said, I still have a long way to go and I’m still dependent on jQuery.
Sprinting forward
I wasn’t the only one who was successful in their endeavors either. This has led our boss to expand these sprints to the whole company. We now have a company wide ongoing education/training plan based around our initial sprint experiment. Every month, as individuals, we all have a new skill or certification we work towards that is work related. Additionally, we have a weekly group training session where the whole company takes a deep dive on a new subject.
TL;DR
I did learn the basics of AngularJS in 30 days. I didn’t manage to use it in a real world application. I accidentally learned a lot about JavaScript and leveled up in a few key components. Our department’s experiment was such a roaring success that it has been implemented company wide. All in all, I’d say that’s a pretty good outcome. I’m definitely happy with it. I also forgot just how much I love learning entirely new things.