I don’t know about you but sleep has not been a close and personal friend of mine. Its a love/hate relationship at best tending towards the latter, or is it ladder? I must be tired. It was on Day 3 (dun, dun, dunnnn) that I noticed that I had forgotten to sleep much *cough* is that an owl? *harumph* I am fine, as I was saying an owl has three eyelids: one for blinking, one for sleeping and one for keeping the eye clean and healthy. Wait, I had a segue I was supposed to say, something about night owls…

To The Notes!!!

Best Practices

I have to preface this with a caveat. I really liked this lecture. It made me feel as though I could contribute if only because I enjoy clarity over cleverness. I usually stand in awe of cleverness, but strive for clarity. If that makes sense. Well on to the actual notes.

Save often! Use the auto-save feature of whatever IDE you are in. If it does not have one complain. Only commit to git when working.

Frameworks, when, where, why? (sometimes what?) – It’s a roll your own (smoking reference in this day and age?) vs others. If you really must I would say roll your own, but REALLY look for another solution or you are wasting your time. Let others solve the problems that have already been identified by the community, for now. (A Jedi must have patience)

Modularity

Keep parts together that are related. Avoid bad closure. use input var/let for dependencies, avoid mutating. avoid global. avoid side effects.

Decoupling

Keep unrelated things, unrelated. It sounds obvious but I have found it easy to want to ‘normalize‘ everything. This is the wrong use of normalize, hence the quotes and italics but you will hear it used this way in the real world. They really mean avoid mutating. I see decoupling as breaking the functions down to as small as possible. For the MASH fans out there:

I do one thing at a time, I do it well, and then I move on.
                                                                   –Charles Emerson Winchester III

Abstractions

Hide the guts. Show the usage. It really can be that simple. Think _.each(array, thingToDo); vs

function(collection, iterator) {
  if(Array.isArray(collection)){
    for (var i=0; i < collection.length; i++)
     iterator(collection[i], i, collection);
  } else {
    for (var key in collection) {
       iterator(collection[key], key, collection);
    }
  }
}

Style

Self describing code is better than comments, but comments are better than clever. Follow the company style. Aim for short, compact code. MVP first.

Embrace Failure!

Failure is inevitable, it also indicates you are doing something interesting. Simply put, what is the formula for success? Fail until you succeed.

Common Pitfalls

Failure to read instructions. Read them. Then re-read them. Then.. yeah. Think about the intention.

Formatting

Use 2 spaces instead of tab. White space is your friend. Be consistent. Keep blocks aligned. Avoid redundancy. Keep blocks aligned. Did I mention to avoid redundancy? No? Well do it.

‘use strict’

It was a great day!