David Lindell Farken

I thought of starting with “Welcome to my first blog post!” because that’s how I started the last three times, with some variation. I’ve decided enough with the ceremony, I should just dive in. But do consider yourself welcome to my humble blog.

I’ve zoomed through the Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship on Udacity, probably faster than I should have. We’re allowed three months, and I finished in less than a week since I have so much time on my hands. Still, if I hope to be selected for the next step, the Mobile Web Specialist scholarship, I need to stay active on the forums and help other people out. This will be a good way for me to review the material, so it sounds like a plan.

I learned how to make an app offline-first using service workers. This helps mobile users a lot because some content will load (maybe old content, but still) in low or no connection areas. No more “lie-fi”!

The rest of the course was about all the new features in ES6. I’ve been a fan for as long as I’ve worked with JavaScript, since I started after ES6 was released. Strangely, I got a bit frustrated with the new object method definition shorthand. The old way:

myObj = {
  name: "foo",
  hairColor: "brown",
  someMethod: function() {
    // method code here;
  }
}

can now be written like this:

myObj = {
  name: "foo",
  hairColor: "brown",
  someMethod() {
    // method code here;
  }
}

I see that it’s shorter, which might make it better, and I’ve read that it brings method definitions more in line with how get() { ... } and set() { ... } are defined in ES5, which are both fair points. But I’m used to reading JavaScript objects as key-value pairs, and part of me misses the colon. What’s more, given the new kind of this-scoping we see in arrow functions (also ES6), I have some trouble processing a strange third thing that uses neither the function keyword nor the arrow =>. Even now, I’m not sure I can say confidently how this would work inside a method defined the new way. I’m sure I will one day.