Unfortunately, I missed last week, and while I think the video is OK, it’s 1) too long and 2) a bit off-mark for motivational. The focus is more on the demo. That said, I think it does a credible job of showing how the Chrome debugger could make your life easier in the face of understanding the complexity of browser-side programming. And, I’ve spent more time on this than I really have to spend already…
I was thinking more of folks like y’all who are somewhat advanced and would know what most of the core concepts are — JavaScript, debuggers, asynchronous programming, etc.
Demotivation
As a graduate student I took a class in text mining using Scala. I had actually done some enterprise java programming between grad school and grad school [sic], and this course dropped me right back in the deep end and reminded me why I hated Java. There is no drive towards consensus in the community, there are many solutions even for trivial things (like simple operations on strings), and I’d been out of the loop long enough that I knew I’d need to learn that space all over again. On top of this, I was using a library that was severely affected by problems in using dynamic containers with static types. And there was no direction to resources to help us navigate this pre-requisite step.
I really wanted to learn this stuff, but I was busy, the chore was unpleasant, and I had no colleagues to go through it with me. I dropped the course. (Though now that I have more time, I’m trying to help popularize some of the tools developed out of that class!)