Lots of learning this week, as always. I went through all of the Advanced JavaScript course on Pluralsight. The quality of the course has got me wanting to check out Kyle Simpson’s You Don’t Know JS book series. Working through You Don’t Know JS would be a major growth process for any web developer. I also started checking out some Elixir courses by starting Pluralsight’s Getting Started with Elixir course. Elixir is every bit as cool as its reputation.

In addition to working through numerous courses on Pluralsight, I’ve been trying to pick up the game of chess. Growing up I never really played the game much but I’m currently fascinated by it. The game is so deep and complex. Right now I’m using [lichess][lc] to learn how to play the game and trying to compete against the AI in games. I’m terrible but getting better each day. The site is technically impressive and open source. Check out the code on github. Looking at the source code makes me want to study Scala.

On the MOOC front, I started a new course on Coursera called Mastering the Software Engineering Interview. I’ve seen that there are books on this topic, like Cracking the Coding Interview, but I’ve never seen the content covered from the perspective of a university course. I’m through all the content from the first week and it’s high-quality so far. The course does not actually let non-paying customers complete the exercises though so there will be no formal completion for me. Luckily I’m more interested in the course material than I am in earning a certificate of completion.

Finished

PluralSight Course(s): Advanced JavaScript

Currents

MOOC Course: Mastering the Software Engineering Interview

PluralSight Course(s): Implementing and Securing an API with ASP.NET Core, Building a RESTful API with ASP.NET Core, Getting Started with .NET Core on Mac and Linux, Getting Started with Elixir

Book(s): Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Travel

On the Next…

I’m going to spend some time with Elixir this week. It’s nice to slip into the functional style after writing object-oriented code most of the day. I hope to also circle back around to studying .NET Core some more. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Idealistz application and there will be a lot of cool features. I will write out some user stories and ideal deal flows for how the application will work in the coming week.