# A brief about JavaScript, clean code, and unit testing

 👋 Hey everyone. Welcome back. 

It's **week 2** of my *#12weeks12blogs* challenge. And I must say it's not easy to stay motivated all the time. I realized the importance of knowing your next move. Discipline is hard. So I spent an entire day thinking, planning, and digging my bookmarks of resources, to create an *ultimate plan*  based on my goals.

![master plan.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1605497465017/pAC6PWFjM.png)

## 🐣 Back to basics
It's weird. The same topics when you revisit after a long time, you understand a lot differently. You get a new perspective and lots of *' Oh, so this is how it works'* moments.

This week I revisited DOM and it's basic concepts like
- Accessing dom elements
- Traversing the dom and making changes to it.
- Handling different events in JavaScript

And made a simple app that counts characters, words, and estimates reading time while typing. It was super easy and fun. You can see it live [here](https://counterbox.now.sh).

![counterbox.gif](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1605438918775/V496VBR8E.gif)

One good thing I observed was how I was coming up with better solutions every time. It's a big win. And that brings me to the importance of writing clean code. 

## 🤷‍♂️  Why clean code?

> 
"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." - Martin Fowler

Even the bad code works well. Then why should I care about writing clean code? It's simple. Clean code is easy to understand, change, and maintain. If you want to be a **good programmer**, clean code is important. I went through the code I wrote a year ago and now I know. When I first heard about clean code, I thought it's just indenting the code well. But it's way more than that. Here are a few things I learned about clean code.

- Use meaningful names for variables, functions, classes, etc. Robin Wieruch has explained it really well in [this](https://www.robinwieruch.de/javascript-naming-conventions) blog.
- Make your Functions do one thing
- Write comments only when needed. Good code mostly documents itself.
- Don't repeat yourself.
 
It will take some time and practice for me to write clean code. It's an iterative process of learning and improving. *Clean Code by Robert Martin* is next on my reading list. But for now, this repo is enough to get started.
    
[![ReadMe Card](https://github-readme-stats.vercel.app/api/pin/?username=ryanmcdermott&repo=clean-code-javascript)](https://github.com/ryanmcdermott/clean-code-javascript)

## ✅ Unit testing in JavaScript
Testing is simply checking if our code is working right or not. And unit testing is a technique where we divide our code into small isolated units and then write tests to check if the unit works as expected.

I explored [Jest](https://jestjs.io), a popular JavaScript testing framework, and wrote my first unit test. The jest docs are pretty good. And this [series on the unit testing](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0zVEGEvSaeF_zoW9o66wa_UCNE3a7BEr) by fun fun function is too good. Testing is an important aspect of software development and I will definitely dive deep into it in the nearby future.

So far it's been a great start for me, and I am very excited to learn more in the upcoming weeks. 


**Thread of the week:**

%[https://twitter.com/RandallKanna/status/1325666898084679680]


____________________
I keep writing about the things I learned and applied. So you can connect with me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/WankhadeRutik), [Github](https://github.com/rutikwankhade)  or [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rutik-wankhade). Also, subscribe to my newsletter and stay up-to-date with my latest blog posts.

⚡ Happy Learning!  

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