We’re at the halfway point (or near it, at least). Just when I thought things were going great and I was excited to put what I learned into action, it all blew up in my face. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on jQuery but this week, it slipped through my clutches.

Here are a couple things I learned:

1. If something doesn’t sound familiar, ask for help immediately. Don’t assume it is just another way to say something you already know.
2. Write down thorough notes when doing the Codecademy lessons. I did this with my HTML and CSS lessons, but stopped writing as much when I got to JavaScript and jQuery. Once it was time to create something of my own, it was harder to recall the step-by-step.
3. Attention-to-detail is key. Coding is particular. One wrong character and all the slides that were previously hidden show up again, even though you just figured out how to get your button to work after spending hours just figuring out that you had to load the jQuery before the JavaScript in your HTML (true story).

If you couldn’t tell, this week was challenging. This video helped me a little, but I still couldn’t quite get it and I still don’t know exactly what it is that I don’t know.

Here are a couple specific questions I had:

1. When working in JavaScript, do you use language from both jQuery and JavaScript? Or is it that once you load jQuery, you have to use it the whole time?
2. How do you increment/decrement in jQuery(/javaScript?)?
3. What am I doing wrong when trying to increment that makes all of the slides come back up?

Anyhoo, jQuery will not take me out without a fight. I’m coming to class with my pencil ready, and my mind clear.

Here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect for my midterm:

Diana O. Eromosele is a software developer at Newsela. She is also the founder/developer of categorizedtweets.com, a tool that sorts politicians’ tweets out by issue so constituents can easily take a quick look at what they care about. When she’s not busy coding, Diana also teaches web development languages. She has a journalism background. Look out for my profile to find out how/why she made the switch!