Forem: Scott Andrews

Make Your Javascript Code Cleaner - Ternary Operator

Scott Andrews — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 16:18:13 +0000

Welcome to a new series called Make Your Javascript Code Cleaner , In this series we will cover advanced topics that beginners may not know, but can have a big impact on your programming ability and impress your peers in code reviews.

Ternary Operator

So what is the ternary operator? Well that's the question that I had until this operator got pointed out to me in a recent code review. Since then i've doug deeper into the topic and decided to share my findings here.

Basic syntax

condition ? expression_1 : expression_2;

So lets run through this. The condition is going to be what your comparing e.g. 1 > 0 ? or 1 >= 0 ? . You can carry out any comparrison like this or more commonly you will be comparing a variable like age > 18 ?.

Then you want to make sure you follow your condition with a question mark ?. Your now free to outline your expressions. The first expression will be what you want to happen if the condition is true. This can be anything you like such as a string or boolean. Then add a : after the expression. You can then outline your second expression which will take place if your condition is false.

Let me outline this in a usable example:

const age = 18;
const isAdult = age >= 18 ? true : false;
// Will return true as age is set to 18

This is just a simple example but of course could be expanded for a variety of types in whatever circumstances you need.

Why Use?

Faster

Now there's not much evidence on this but I did come across an article by Kenneth Xu. He carrys out a speed comparison between how long a computer takes to process a ternary operator to an if else statement. He concluded that there is a very small difference between the two but the ternary operator was processed slightly quicker. If this is followed through a large codebase then there could be a noticible difference in speed which may have an impact on your program or system.

Advanced Usage

We can take ternary operators further than the examples above too.

const position = 2;
const finishingPosition = position == 1 ? "1st" : ( position == 2 ? "2nd" : "3rd Or Lower");
// Will return 2nd

This is equivelent to

const position = 2;
const finishingPosition = "";

if(position == 1){
  finishingPosition = "1st";
} 
else if(position == 2){
    finishingPosition = "2nd";   
}
else{
    finishingPosition = "3rd Or Lower";
}

As you can see the ternary operator is stil a lot shorter but when you're starting to put else if's into the code you should really be starting to question wheather or not a ternary operator is best, as it is not as readable at this point and can go on to create a long single line statement.

Anyway I hope this article was useful to you and you've been as inspired by the ternary operator as I was when I first discovered how useful it can be in your Javascript development.

Cheers, Scott

How To Land A Great Graduate/Junior Tech Job

Scott Andrews — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 22:46:20 +0000

Step 1 - Find A Job

So this step sounds like it would be the most simple. Wrong, The highest quality graduate schemes start their hiring process in the October before you graduate. This means you need to be organised and prompt to apply even though the job won't start for another year yet. A great website to help with finding these jobs is Milkround. You can register for email alerts to always stay on-top of new graduate schemes coming available. Another thing to note is that it's well worth applying to a job even if you don't have all of the available skills they're after. Most graduate employers will spend lots of time training you up, so you just need to prove your willing to learn.

Step 2 - The Application Process

Right so you've found a job at your dream company. Now the hard work begins, Proving to them that your better than all the other hundreds of others that may have applied. Now most companies will only require a CV at the start to get you through to the next stage. For this you've got to make yours stand out from the crowd. Here's some things you can do to help boost your chances.

Take a placement year during your degree. This is the single most important thing you can do to help your chances as having a year more experience over everybody else is massive. It also gives you opportunities to speak about what you've achieved while on placement and the impact you had on the company.
Program in your spare time. Just programming for your degree is not enough, you need to be building things you enjoy in your spare time while playing around with the latest technologies.
Add a section about your hobbies and other interests outside of programming. Companies like to see that your sociable and have a life outside of programming.

Step 3 - Round 2 Of The Application Process

Great so the company like your CV, well done! You've probably beaten loads of people to get to this point. Now the company will likely want to you to fill in a detailed set of questions based on the role and your technical skills and experience. The main thing with these type of questions is that you have plenty of time (usually a week or two). This means there is no need to rush. Take your time and if you're not sure on a particular technical project then go educate yourself on Google or go help you... bing. When you're confident that you've answered the questions well then submit and hope for the best. Usually companies will allow you to come back to your answers later so it may be worth leaving them overnight and coming back to them later.

Step 4 - The Interview

So you've been invited to an interview. That's great you've probably made it down to the last 20 at most now so well done! So it's the day before the interview and you're probably nervous which is totally normal. I always found the best way to relax my nerves was to read over my achievements and experience the night before. So the day has arrived, first things first arrive to the location with plenty of time. Theres nothing worse than rushing and being worked up when you arrive. Before the interviews start you'll likely be in the same room as other applicants. My advice is to not think of these people as your competition but to be friendly and kind towards them. Having these conversations before the day starts helps relax you as well as builds relationships with others which will come across in the interviews.

Tips For The Day

Enjoy it
You've worked hard to get to this point, your probably at a huge companies head quarters by now which nobody gets to see so think of it as an exclusive tour.
Keep Smiling
If the interviewers see you keep smiling then it's infectious and will rub off on them and they'll remember you as a happy person and a friendly person they want at their company.
Keep Eye Contact
Combine this with the smiling and it will seem like your an engaged person who is willing to listen.

My Experience

Using these tips and just enjoying the application process and not expecting too much landed me graduate opportunities at great UK companies such as the BBC, McLaren Racing and Bet 365. All of these opportunities were unexpected and it was a pleasure to receive them. Any questions about the application processes please leave them below and i'll be happy to answer them :)

How I Taught Myself Swift And IOS Development

Scott Andrews — Sun, 11 Nov 2018 11:06:27 +0000

My love for the swift programming language started back in 2014 when Apple announced swift as a new programming language for building iPhone and Mac applications. Immediately I knew I had to begin learning this brand new method of developing. At the time of starting to learn swift, I only new the barebones of how to build a website and was just getting to grips with HTML and CSS which are worlds apart from the skills required to build a good ios app. At the time of beginning to learn ios development, I was 15 years of age with a new mac mini that my family had brought me as a Christmas present in 2015. I immediately dived into learning from the ground up having only really experimented with javascript a tiny bit before to help make my websites more interactive. For those of you asking did you do computing at school, well we kinda did but our school mainly focussed on just doing ICT which was basically just how to use Microsoft word and excel. We did use to use scratch a bit in early days and here is an example of a game I made back in 2012 when I was 14 my first game. This game won best in my class at the time and I'm proud of it as my first stepping stone into programming.

Moving on after I got to grips with mac os one of the first programs I installed was Xcode. Being eager I jumped right into building an app with Xcode and was completely overwhelmed by the number of buttons and files that I did not understand and part of me thought there's no way I'm going to be able to do this. I took a step back and began following this swift tutorial by Rob Percival. It was great it dropped me slowly into the world of a completely new way of programming that was new to me. Even the excitement of getting a button click to do something on my phone was amazing to me. Over the next few years, I lost touch with IOS applications a bit with having to focus a lot on my GCSE and A-level results in order for me to go and study computing at university.

Having successfully gotten into uni I began programming IOS apps in a large amount of spare time that you have at the university. Here was the first ios app that I nearly published f1 times. It basically converted the time of each f1 race into your local time. I'm a big f1 fan so this was great fun to make. Looking back now the code for it is very badly written with loads of repeated code but at least it was a start.

In the second year of university, we had a module dedicated to mobile application development. This was my time to shine. It was probably the module that I tried the hardest at in the second year. The module was mainly teaching how to use Cordova to build mobile apps which were good due to the limited time constraints that we had in the module with just 3 hours a week of lectures and only 8 months to complete the module. For the final assessment, we had to build a mobile application. I chose to make my mobile application using Xcode. The app was called Disturb and was designed for users to not use their phone. Disturb.

Moving on I am now on a placement year at a web company called essential marketer. Once my boss found out I could program mobile apps he started getting me to program mobile app for him or at least prototype ideas he had. The main one we have stuck with is an automatic driving tracking application which automatically starts tracking how far you drive when it detects that your driving. We all think it's pretty cool and should be hitting the ios app store soon.

so that's my journey so far. Ios development has taught me that the best way to learn any programming language is just to do it and put the hours in no matter how hard it may be.

Thanks, Scott Andrews

How I Made A Gradient Generator

Scott Andrews — Sat, 13 Jan 2018 19:39:32 +0000

Being my first post on dev.to I think it's best to introduce myself first. I'm Scott Andrews and i'm a second year computing student at the university of Worcester in the United Kingdom. I started programming with HTML and CSS at the age of 12 and never looked back. I have a couple of website clients and am about to publish my first IOS app.

I went about starting to build the website by first choosing jQuery to be my javascript framework of choice. I went for jQuery as it enabled me to quickly and easily hide sections of html code and respond to hover events. jQuery also adds simple animations which is powerful.

After a bit of google searching I came across stack overflow (which is where I spend 90% of my time on the internet.) the required javascript method to be able to create a random hex decimal value.

randomColourOne = "#000000".replace(/0/g,function(){return (~~(Math.random()*16)).toString(16);});

Once the value was created it needed to be assigned to the background of the website. For that I used the -webkit-linear-gradient css style which does still have its compatibility issues but runs fine on codepen.

var background = document.getElementById("background"); background.style.backgroundImage = "-webkit-linear-gradient("+ randomColourOne +" , "+ randomColourTwo +")";

That was in essence the bulk of the Javascript. The whole code is available at codepen.

Thanks Guys, Scott Andrews